Kiss – A Love Story is a stunning short film directed by Joseph Hodgson & Franck Aubry set to a beautiful song entitled “Stille” by Bendik. It’s not a complex piece, and fairly abstract, but it’s almost a perfect combination of sound and imagery. ( As John Martz at Drawn notes, you may want to set it to full screen when you watch it, as the aspect ratio makes the video tiny when scaled down to fit our template.)

Via Drawn

Post tags: Animation, Art, Music

You would probably want to be careful when making a movie that involves Afghanistan. You could, perhaps, be more cavalier in dealing with Osama bin Laden (in the U.S. at least), but I’d think you would want to exhibit some sort of sensitivity when making a film about a country we’ve been involved with on, let’s just say, unpleasant terms for a while now. It seems like a bad idea to make a film about a group of white people (like, super white people) running around a poor, war-torn country (our war, no less) doing sick karate kicks and slaughtering the local populace in droves, even if they’re “zombies”, and then have them partake in hot, white people make-out sessions in between said slaughter. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.

Post tags: Film, Horror, War, We disapprove, Why

If you were a Parisian gentleman in 1923 looking for the newest thing in personal mobility, you may have had a keen interest in the above: cycle-skating. Essentially small bicycle wheels strapped to your legs, they could be used with or without poles, “ski style”. Perfect for the hip, urban man on the go. Just make sure to hike those trousers up over your knee-highs.

Via Buzzfeed

Post tags: Crackpot Visionary, Faboo, Fashion, Technology, Ye Olde

Space Stallions, a bachelor film project from the 2012 Animation Workshop, plays like every Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood boiled down into one four minute concept. Created by Thorvaldur S. Gunnarsson, Jonatan Brüsch, Ágúst Kristinsson, Arna Snæbjørnsdottir, Esben J. Jespersen, Touraj Khosravi and Polina Bokhan, it appears to have everything: spaceships, spandex-clad heroes, rainbows, unicorn-shaped hoverbikes, moustaches, and laser eggs. It’s like someone put peyote in your Lucky Charms.

Post tags: Animation, Cosmos, Crackpot Visionary, Kid Stuff, Sci-fi, Television

The best, silliest thing: Aardman Animations — the studio responsible for Wallace and Grommit and the series Creature Comforts, among others — teams up with DC Comics to produce a series of shorts for Cartoon Network. This one uses a setup similar to the aforementioned Creature Comforts, here taking some familiar DC villains and heroes having children voice them. So silly, but so, so good.

Via Drawn

Post tags: Animation, Geekdom, Silly-looking types

A short film by Jim Henson from 1963 created for an AT&T seminar on data communication:

The organizers of the seminar, Inpro, actually set the tone for the film in a three-page memo from one of Inpro’s principals, Ted Mills to Henson. Mills outlined the nascent, but growing relationship between man and machine: a relationship not without tension and resentment: “He [the robot] is sure that All Men Basically Want to Play Golf, and not run businesses — if he can do it better.” (Mills also later designed the ride for the Bell System at the 1964 World’s Fair.) Henson’s execution is not only true to Mills’ vision, but he also puts his own unique, irreverent spin on the material.

Sure beats a PowerPoint presentation. This wasn’t the first gig for the smoke-belching, metal host either, it had already made a previous, corporate appearance in 1961, at the US Food Fair in Hamburg, Germany:

Via AT&T Archives : Poetv

Post tags: Faboo, Puppetry, Robots

Spanish artist Oscar Sanmartin Vargas has a staggering portfolio of mixed media work, ranging from dioramas, to surreal architectural etchings, to detailed studies of alien biological specimens. The drawings are especially haunting; all their subjects depicted under a perpetually overcast sky. In regards to those strange animals: he released a book in 2007, entitled Leyendario: Criaturas de Agua (Legendary Creatures of the Water), a video preview of which can be found below. I am completely smitten with these — the line work, the use of empty space, the mystery of them. They are simply wonderful.

Read the rest of Oscar Sanmartin Vargas

Post tags: Art, Faboo, Flora & Fauna, Surreal

A quick Google search shows that this video is pretty much everywhere, but I just can’t resist putting it here. Following up their Star Wars themed Passat commercial for last year’s Super Bowl, Volkswagen returns this year, and once again puts “The Imperial March” to excellent use, in this case having it performed by twelve dogs, some in various forms of Star Wars costumery. It’s so very silly but I love it so very much; especially the grand entrance of the twelfth and final member of this canine chorus. So. Good.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Post tags: Advertising, Art, Faboo, Geekdom, Sci-fi

Korean artist Minjeong An’s oeuvre is varied but these self portrait diagrams stand out. Mind-bogglingly detailed, they invite the viewer to fall into their complex webs of lines and labels. Visually they’re almost overwhelming, the lines seeming to shift between abstract patterns and strictly ordered plans. These you really have to check out on her site in high resolution, as our image sizing here doesn’t do them justice.

Via 50 Watts

Post tags: Art, Faboo

“Two Against One” from the album Rome, a collaboration between Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi, which came out last year. Featuring vocals by Jack White, it’s been supplied with a spectacularly hallucinatory video directed by Chris Milk and Anthony Francisco Schepperd. Just beautiful work.

Via who killed bambi?

Post tags: Animation, Art, Faboo, Madness, Magic