Len Lye’s 1935 film, ‘A Colour Box,’ was made by painting and applying dye directly to the film surface. It is apparently the first direct paint film to gain a general public release and has been widely seen ever since. The film is an odd way to advertise for cheap parcel post and this message [...]

In 1936, experimental filmmaker Len Lye made this short surreal animation to advertise the benefits of Shell oil for lubricating things. The film is a hyper-saturated stop-motion extravaganza that involves a mechanical world turning on some sort of hand crank. There’s an adventurer driving around the sands of Egypt. His car winds down and konks [...]

Here’s a wonderful glimpse into the animation techniques that were pioneering at the time of Disney’s first feature-length animation, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ You get to see some shots of Snow White being drawn and photographed, sound effects being recorded, and people arriving at the premiere. You also get a good dose of [...]

Emlyn Boyle of Ireland made this beautiful Gothic horror animation about a girl who has a late night encounter with a young vampire.

An episode of Sticks by the Brothers McLeod for BBC Comedy.

This excellent short film was made by Andrew S. Allen, utilizing a form of rotoscoping that creates a flat paper cutout look. The story follows the strange and suspenseful activities of a Professor White who sets out to decode one of the famous Thomas Beale ciphers which supposedly reveals the location of an enormous stash [...]

Look at this! Will you just trust me and watch this thing all the way through? It’s absolutely brilliant! It mixes techniques like they are child’s play! Stop-motion, hand-drawn, live action super 8, claymation, psychedelic explosions, fireworks exploding from the heads of alien attackers when they die, forest battles, miniature model sets! It’s incredible. It [...]

Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds posted this 1924 Russian propaganda masterpiece. It’s a wild, science fiction, abstract work of art that just keeps pumping out wondrous images, one after the other. I love the ragged edges and mix of photographs, hand-drawn animation and cutouts.

Sokak Savasakarsi made this anti-war stop-motion street art piece in several Turkish cities.  Unidentified hooded street artists place newspapers with cutout soldiers around the city.  Then the soldiers start moving.

Lotte Reiniger, the animator who made the oldest surviving animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, created this version of Hansel and Gretel in 1955. It uses her cutout silhouette technique.