Yesterday, Gizmodo was one of several sites to report that Taiwanese absurdist animation studio NMA was up for sale as part of its parent company, Hong Kong-based Next Media. But not so, says NMA, in a video that seems to be a panda bear using a copy machine to poop out Tiger Woods, Steve Jobs and the President of the United States.
NMA, the Dadaist absurdo-animation studio responsible for all those ridiculous interpretations of current events, is broke. So broke it’s looking to sell itself to cover huge losses it’s been taking — Next Media as a whole is actually a massive media company. Bottom line: it’s possible we’ve seen the last glorious bit of NMA weirdness.
You should really still read Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an ageing fisherman’s battle with a massive marlin, but if you can’t be bothered, this animation serves as the most enjoyable CliffsNotes you’ll ever find for The Old Man and the Sea.
This rad little stop-motion video made by Australian design firm Messy Design is an awesome, creative use of everyday things. But really, you’re a design firm and you left the tripod legs and extension cord in the shot? Tsk tsk. Maybe they’re called Messy Design for a reason.
This beautiful stop-motion animation is the video to Josh Ritter’s new song Love Is Making Its Way Back Home. It’s an enchanting track, but what really grabs you is the accompanying footage, made using over 12,000 pieces of individually cut paper.
Petros Vrellis has turned Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night into an animation that changes when the user touches it. The effect is so beautiful and mesmerizing that I’m now craving an app that would let me do the same.
Aside from True Grit there hasn’t been a decent Western movie in years. No, Rango was neither a Western nor good, but Little Tombstone, made by students at ESMA Toulouse, makes me long for the days of the Spaghetti Western and shows, once again, why being an Undertaker is the superior career path.
As revolutionary as the introduction of CGI was for animation, sometimes hand-drawn pieces can still be just as amazing. Case in point: Keep Drawing by South Korean animation house, Studio Shelter. Each frame is drawn in a distinct animation style but stitched together around the same characters. Just check it out, you’ll see what I mean.
To the naked eye, the intricate paper patterns attached to these bike wheels look like nothing but a blur when it’s in motion. But when filmed with a video camera, the limited frame rate reveals complex animations.
The magic of the muppets is that they’re ‘real’, or as real as puppetry gets. Still, even when the Muppets could have easily gone CGI, they stuck to their roots. That doesn’t mean everything in the new Muppets movie was old school though. Even muppets need the magic of the movies.
