In Canada they have this government-funded movie production company called the NFB (National Film Board), with an animation department that's been financing short animated films since 1941. I had no idea this existed until just a few years ago, sometime after I'd moved to Canada to go to college. I don't know if this is something everyone knew about except me, but assuming it isn't, I'd like to share a few of my favorite films from their archive, available for free on youtube and their official website which is slightly more complete.
Begone Dull Care (1949)
Created by the first NFB animator Norman McLaren, this abstract animation was apparently done by etching and painting directly onto film. It's an interesting technique, and creates a wild optical effect, both high-energy and rich with textural detail. And it's better synced to the music than any other pre-computer animation I've seen! I imagine he could see the sound track on the film (that was a thing back then!) and would put down marks precisely where the waveform swells.
Karate Kids (1990)
No relation to that movie. This may be one of my favorite animated films ever, and before I spoil it by talking about it you should just watch it:
I can't embed it (non-youtube) so here's the link
I really love the art & animation in this one. If you watched five minutes and clicked off it cause it's a little kids' edutainment cartoon, go back and finish it 'cause you're about to get your mind blown. I've shown this cartoon to maybe ten people and I swear no one sees that moment coming. And not only is the moment totally shocking and bizarre and morbidly funny, once you catch your breath and take a second to think about it, you may realize it was exactly the right choice for getting the message across loud and clear to the exact people who needed to hear it. There's a great filmmaking lesson here - that violating the implicit rules of your universe is a great way to get the audience to sit up and pay attention. I mean the whole cartoon is great, but the moment is a stroke of genius.
Of Dice and Men (1988)
One of the first 2D computer animated short films ever, and another all-time favorite of mine. If you read the credits, you'll note that writer/director/animator John Weldon actually created the software it was animated on! Using just eight colors (RGBCMYKW) it was rendered one frame at a time and shot by a film camera aimed at a computer monitor. How do I know this? I emailed him and asked. [Please note: I officially have an email from a guy who won an Oscar]
Brad Bird once said of The Incredibles that he wanted his team to "use every part of the buffalo" - to try and find creative uses for every little thing their tools were capable of. Well I don't think I could name a 2D computer-animated film that squeezes more juice out of its software than this one. The eight available colors are stretched to create a vast palette through dithering, the backgrounds are detailed with earthbound-esque algorithmic patterns, and shape-tween-like interpolation stands in for inbetweens often with a total disregard for form. It's the type of thing that can only exist at the dawn of a new medium, when there are no rules, and yet he still manages to break them.
I don't know if any of you will love this aesthetic like I do - I've always had a thing for high-contrast, dense and saturated visuals - the sort that can only be produced by a computer. Did you know I liked Problem Solverz? Not just to be a contrarian either - I saw the first episode on TV, before the internet collectively decided to ignore the possibility that it might look like that on purpose! Well the show got cancelled, Paper Rad doesn't exist anymore, and ac-bu is kicking ass, so it looks like we're behind Japan yet again when it comes to making interesting animation that pushes the medium forward. Nice going guys!
Mindscape (1976)
You know that toy where it's a box of pins and you press your hand or your face against it and it makes like a 3D image of your hand? Well if you make that same grid of pins 10 times larger and make the individual pins 10 times smaller, you can cast a light against it and get a neat tool for "painting" greyscale images that, unlike regular painting, you can edit infinitely without the canvas degrading. This makes it a viable medium for stop-motion animation, or at least it is when taxpayers are footing the bill, since it's an absurdly time-consuming process!
Pinscreen animation is all the limitations of stop-motion combined with all the limitations of animating on a sheet of paper. Like clay or puppet-based stop-motion, you can't go back and fix mistakes, and you have to remember the speed at which everything onscreen is supposed to be moving or the end result comes out weird and jerky. Like animating on single sheets of paper, you don't have multiple layers to make manipulating the image more manageable. That means any time anything moves, the background has to be re-drawn bit by bit wherever the foreground elements move out of the way. And remember, you're manipulating physical pins, which takes forever to begin with.
But limitations, of course, are the fuel for creativity, and every choice of shot, movement, and optical effect in this film is designed around the few things pinscreen can do, and the zillion things it can't do, like moving the camera, or a simple zoom. Because actually, you can move the camera if you abstract the space into something manageable, and you can zoom in on an image, if you can make it make sense to do it like this.
I really like those little moments where common filmmaking techniques press against the boundaries of the medium, and something entirely new is created. You would never think to do any of those things unless you were working with a crazy painstaking animation technique like pinscreen, and yet all the strange choices, born of necessity, get the job done just fine.
These days I get the impression that animation always starts with story, and then the visuals take whatever shape they need to to get that story across without breaking the bank. (by the way, those stories usually suck!) While that kind of top-down approach to art is valid and important, I think the bottom-up approach is equally important - starting with the tools, the raw ingredients, and asking "what can this do?" - "What kind of shots can we animate with this tool?" Then, "what kind of story can we tell with those shots?" And finally, "what kind of message can we convey from that story?" Wouldn't it be cool if an animated series took that same approach, starting with the unique fingerprint of the tool, and working outward from there? (oh wait, there was one!)
Rectangle & Rectangles & Rectangle (1984)
FLASHING LIGHTS warning! The whole thing is one long flashing-light sequence, actually. I think the best way to take this one in is to get in a dark room, get close to the screen, get comfy, and turn it up to just below ear-damaging volume. After a few minutes it starts to feel like you're on drugs - especially if you're *actually* on drugs, which probably makes it even better!
There's plenty of other good stuff in the NFB archives, again, free on youtube and on their own site nfb.ca. They also have a free app on most chromecast/roku/appletv type-things, but it's not especially good at recommending stuff unless you know exactly what you're looking for. But the youtube channel pretty regularly posts good stuff from the archives, and if you liked any specific thing I linked, you can probably do a search for that director and find more stuff by them. I'm especially a fan of Norman McLaren, John Weldon, and Kaj Pindal, who apparently taught at my alma mater the entire time I was there. He's dead now, so looks like my opportunity to meet him is gone forever. Oops!
There are actually a few things to come out of the NFB that you may have seen before, but I didn't mention any of those because they were all, in my opinion, "just okay!" Here's some other stuff I liked that I didn't put it this post, but you can check out if you are so inclined!
https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/
Unrelated but semi-related, I put out an album last month that you can buy on bandcamp. Maybe reading this post has given you a sense of my weird tastes in aesthetics, so if you want to hear their auditory equivalent then go listen to a few tracks. I uploaded the less illegal-sample-y tracks to NG, so go check those out in my audio uploads, or get a little preview of everything in this audiovisual promo video I made here! It shouldn't be hard to notice the influence from these Canucks!
Emrox
Forgot to mention - there's a whole documentary on the pinscreen animation process, also on the NFB youtube, directed by the guy who animated the paint-on-film thing I linked here! Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ3DSFv4vAg