Animate!

For 16 years, the animate! project has been commissioning some of the most imaginative and innovative short films in the UK, first off for Channel 4 broadcast and for festivals and special screenings worldwide. Light years from conventional animation, these are dynamic experimental works and dazzling, visual encounters, manipulating the moving image into places that live action simply cant reach on its own. This special programme presents the most recent completed works - including films by AL+AL and Koji Yoyama, pictured - as well as a choice selection of back catalogue titles that extend the possibilities of cinema.

www.animateonline.org

Here's the full list of Animate! shorts...
Osbert Parker (6.5 min 2006)
‘Found’ images and objects from magazines to movie clips are cut up, manipulated and reconstructed to create unexpected story strands that fuse into a multi-layered film– beginning as a passionate love story but ending in murder as a dark psychological thriller.
Inger Lise Hansen (4 min 2006)
An upside-down time-lapse camera moves along a beach, inverting the sand and sky as the weather changes. The result is a disorienting and mysterious space where the originally solid ground at the top of the frame appears to be sliding past like a lavastream.
AL + AL (12 min 2006)
A child model is growing up inside a labyrinth formed from her advertising pictures. In this sumptuous but enigmatic and twisted drama we follow a photographer as he travels through the lens to do battle in a world of perfect illusions.
We Believe in Happy Endings, Monika Forsberg & Susie Sparrow (4 min 2006)
At the party, humans, animals and ‘other-worldly’ beings dance the night away. She’s a monster, she is gorgeous, He is well fit, my fur is wet. I’m so happy I’m going to throw up, I’m going to kick your head in! We believe in happy endings. Sebastian Buerkner (7.5 min 2006) A vivid imagination can be a seductive but debilitating distraction from life. Twisted fantasies, associations and flashbacks offer an enticing escape, and even a mundane room may be made more bearable by mentally morphing space and time. But the real world continues, demanding, undermining, overwhelming… From Nose to Mouth Joji Koyama (17 min 2006) A nameless protagonist trains to learn a dance sequence. Set in a demanding and disorientating arena of boundaries, structures and languages, the lessons are not going very well... Careful Damien Gascoigne (6 min 2005) A series of inter-cut visual postcards, snapshots of ordinary family situations. Caring, anxious but distracted parents are teaching their children to be safe. However they are in a battle with Fate to avoid disasters – and dry cleaning bills. Rabbit Run Wrake (7 min 2005) A selection of 1950s educational stickers, discovered in a provincial junkshop twenty years ago, provide the ingredients for this adult fairytale. When a boy and girl find an idol in the stomach of a rabbit, its magical abilities lead to riches, but for how long? Who I Am and What I Want David Shrigley & Chris Shepherd (7 min 23 sec 2005) A scribbled, strangely funny but highly unsettling snapshot of the human condition. The story of a man who bares his emotions, history, hang ups and desires in all of their dysfunctional absurdity then leaves us to assemble not only his identity but to question our own.