Animation – Page 2 – Press Play Video Blog

Animating the Classics

This is the first of six essays based on the list of “250 Great Animated Short Films,” recently published here at Press Play. These six essays will celebrate the inspiration behind some of these films; a complementary series of 20 essays on my cultural history blog, 21 Essays, will focus on common themes.

The inimitable American humorist James Thurber once proposed that Walt Disney should animate Homer’s Odyssey. “(Disney’s) Odyssey can be, I am sure, a far, far greater thing than even his epic of the three little pigs,” Thurber wrote in 1934.

The list of 250 animated great short films that my friends and I recently compiled contains a number of ambitious adaptations in the vein that Thurber proposed above. They transform the world’s great literature into something new—an animated vision. Our list has works adapted from such respected literary stylists as Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, the New Testament Gospel writer Luke, James Thurber, and, yes, even Homer.

There’s no easy formula for adapting material from one medium to another. To do justice to a short story like Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” director John Huston felt he needed 129 minutes—and that was without any significant padding. Nevertheless, animation directors have accepted the challenge of flipping literature into animated short film on many occasions, turning to short stories, poems, novels, and even ancient Greek epics for inspiration. The trick is to get the tone right.

With nearly all of the literature-adapted films on our list, the style of the artwork becomes more important than the script itself in capturing the flavor of the source material. There’s the uncanny pinscreen animation used by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker in 1963 to tell Nikolai Gogol’s weird story The Nose, a black comedy nightmare about a nose that deserts its owner’s face. To adapt Ernest Hemingway’s short novel The Old Man and the Sea, Russian animator Aleksandr Petrov drew upon his mastery of the evocative paint-on-glass style. Elaborating upon Luke’s biblical story of Jesus’ nativity, Russian animator Mikhail Aldashin created charming scenes that look like old woodcuts come to life in Rozhdestvo (1997). With each of these films, the visual style adds a new layer of meaning to the original narrative.

Although James Thurber was impressed by the realistic fantasy of the Disney Studio, it was the UPA (United Productions of America) animation studio that succeeded in translating the Thurber style to film. In retrospect, this makes sense. Thurber’s witty, almost Matisse-like sketches have very little in common with Disney’s pursuit of verisimilitude. Thurber’s drawings look a lot more like the spare, minimalist UPA style, first popularized in the early Mr. Magoo films and Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951). In fact, there’s a good chance that Thurber’s work may have influenced the emerging style of UPA. Stephen Bosustow, one of the three founders of UPA, wanted to tackle a Thurber film right from the start. In 1946, before UPA had even released its first short, Bosustow announced that The Thurber Carnival (a theatrical revue of some of the most popular Thurber stories) would be a possibility for a UPA feature film.

The Thurber Carnival proposal languished unfunded for years, during which time Thurber watched his most famous story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” get the Hollywood big-budget treatment in 1947 courtesy of producer Samuel Goldwyn and star Danny Kaye. Thurber loathed the result. “It began to be bad with the first git-gat-gittle,” Thurber was quoted as saying in Life magazine. “If they spent one tenth of the money, it would have been ten times as good.”

UPA never succeeded in raising the money to make a full-length feature of The Thurber Carnival, but they did eventually film the sly Thurber fable “The Unicorn in the Garden” in 1953. “The Unicorn in the Garden” is a short short story, first published by The New Yorker in 1939 and subsequently appearing in Thurber’s book Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). Accompanying the story, there was a typical Thurber illustration showing a meek-looking man offering a lily to a unicorn. Like the acclaimed UPA work of a decade later, the drawing captured action and character with the barest minimum of lines.

I haven’t found any record of Thurber’s opinion of the charming movie that William T. Hurtz directed of The Unicorn in the Garden. It would be nice to think that Thurber liked it from the first git-gat-gittle—and that he realized that here was a movie ten times as good as Walter Mitty, at one tenth the cost.

Thurber didn’t live to see that he was prescient about the potential for the Homeric epic as animated short film, too. In 1995, British animator Barry Purves created Achilles, his puppet spin on the life of Homer’s champion warrior. Purves daringly centered his short film on the love between Achilles and Patroclus, presenting it as a full-throttle gay love story. The Iliad portion only covers five minutes of an 11-minute film, but Purves manages to swiftly and effectively re-imagine many of Homer’s key scenes in the short time allotted.

Thurber may have been surprised by Purves’ treatment of Homer—it sure isn’t Mickey Mouse!—but his basic point was on the mark. Great literature can be well served by the cartoon medium. Sometimes animation can bring the classic stories to life in ways that simply aren’t available to the cinema of live action.

Here’s a list of 24 literary adaptations drawn from our list of 250 great animated short films. It covers an impressive range of moods, from Hans Christian Andersen’s poignant tales to the strong propaganda of Education for Death (1943) to the surreal horror of Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (2007).

The Little Match Girl (Arthur Davis, USA, 1937)

Ferdinand the Bull (Dick Rickard, USA, 1938)

Porky in Wackyland (Bob Clampett, USA, 1938)

Education For Death (Clyde Geronimi, USA, 1943)

The Little Soldier / Le petit soldat (Paul Grimault, France, 1947)

The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmelee, USA, 1953)

The Unicorn in the Garden (William T. Hurtz, USA, 1953)

What’s Opera, Doc? (Chuck Jones, USA, 1957)

Le nez / The Nose (Alexander Alexeieff & Claire Parker, France, 1963)

The Hangman (Paul Julian & Les Goldman, USA, 1964)

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (Chuck Jones, USA, 1965)

A Christmas Carol (Richard Williams, USA, 1971)

The Selfish Giant (Peter Sander, Canada, 1971)

The Street (Caroline Leaf, Canada, 1976)

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (Caroline Leaf, Canada, 1977)

There Will Come Soft Rains / Budet laskovyy dozhd (Nozim To'laho'jayev, USSR, 1984)

The Man Who Planted Trees / L’homme qui plantait des arbres (Frédéric Back, Canada, 1987)

Death and the Mother (Ruth Lingford, UK, 1988)

The Restaurant of Many Orders / Chumon no ooi ryori-ten (Tadanari Okamoto, Japan, 1993)

Achilles (Barry Purves, UK, 1995)

Christmas / Rozhdestvo (Mikhail Aldashin, Russia, 1997)

The Old Man and the Sea (Aleksandr Petrov, Russia, 1999)

My Love / Moya lyubov (Aleksandr Petrov, Russia, 2006)

Kafuka: Inaka isha / Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor (Koji Yamamura, Japan, 2007)

Lee Price is the Director of Development at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (Philadelphia, PA). In addition, he writes a popular fundraising column for Public Libraries, writes a tourism/history blog called "Tour America's Treasures," and recently concluded two limited-duration blogs, "June and Art" and "Preserving a Family Collection."

250 Great Animated Shorts: The List

In 2008, I organized a team of animation enthusiasts to create the list “100 Important Directors of Animated Short Films.” The list was formally published on Kevin B. Lee’s blog Shooting Down Pictures and Fandor’s Keyframe and currently resides on my cultural history blog, 21 Essays.

This year, I returned to my old friends and proposed revisiting the subject with the construction of another list followed by a blow-out celebration of the art of the animated short film. Completed in late August 2012, our new list is titled “250 Great Animated Short Films.” And that blow-out celebration is now officially in progress: two straight months of cartoon love with pieces published both at 21 Essays and here on Press Play.

To compose our new list, I convened a panel of seven animation enthusiasts—Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and myself. With additional help from other enthusiasts, we spent a month nominating, watching, and voting upon hundreds of films.

As a guide for making our selections, I asked my fellow panelists to make an effort to keep the list chronologically balanced (with a representative sampling of shorts from each decade), geographically diverse, and with a reasonable proportion of female to male directors. Our definition of a short film was 40 minutes or less, and we worked without a set definition of what constitutes an animated film.

And please note that we’ve been very careful to avoid claiming that this is a “best of…” list. Our goal was simply to select some of the greatest for celebration.

Of course, I’d be shocked if anyone is entirely satisfied with our selection. I know I’m not! But I’m still proud of this list. Somehow I lucked out with my volunteer panelists, managing to strike a happy balance between traditionalists and boundary-pushers. I was hoping for a list with great Disney and WB cartoons, abstract animations by Fischinger and Lye, weirdness from Svankmajer and the Quay brothers, and profundity from Norshteyn and Back. And that’s what I got! I’m very happy indeed.

For the next two months, my friends and I will be contributing pieces about some of our favorites from the list. The blog entries on 21 Essays will explore common themes like time and memory, love and courtship, and war and violence.

On Press Play, a series of weekly entries will examine some of the sources of inspiration, such as folk tales, classic literature, and other art forms (painting, music, and theater).

Taken together, this pair of series will constitute our two-pronged celebration.

And it all starts with the list…

250 GREAT ANIMATED SHORT FILMS

The Early Years (1895-1919)

Around a Bathing Hut / Autour d’une cabine (Émile Reynaud, France, 1895)

The Electric Hotel / El hotel eléctrico (Segundo de Chomón, Spain, 1908)

Fantasmagorie (Émile Cohl, France, 1908)

Little Nemo / Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (Winsor McCay, USA, 1911)

The Cameraman’s Revenge / Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora (Wladyslaw Starewicz, Russia, 1912)

How a Mosquito Operates (Winsor McCay, USA, 1912)

Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay, USA, 1914)

Captain Grogg’s Wonderful Journey / Kapten Groggs underbara resa (Victor Bergdahl, Sweden, 1916)

The 1920s

The Frogs Who Wanted a King / Les grenouilles qui demandent un roi (Wladyslaw Starewicz, France, 1922)

Felix In Hollywood (Otto Messmer, USA, 1923)

Opus III (Walter Ruttmann, Germany, 1924)

Symphonie diagonale (Viking Eggeling, Germany, 1924)

Now You Tell One (Charley Bowers, USA, 1926)

Spiritual Constructions / Seelische Konstruktionen (Oskar Fischinger, Germany, 1927)

Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney, USA, 1928)

Ghosts Before Breakfast / Vormittagsspuk (Hans Richter, 1928)

Hell’s Bells (Ub Iwerks, US, 1929)

The Skeleton Dance (Walt Disney, USA, 1929)

The Stolen Lump / Kobu-Tori (Chuzo Aoji and Yasuji Murata, Japan, 1929)

The 1930s

The Idea / L’idée (Berthold Bartosch, 1932)

Night on Bald Mountain / Une nuit sur le mont chauve (Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, France, 1933)

Snow-White (Dave Fleischer, USA, 1933)

Three Little Pigs (Burt Gillett, USA, 1933)

A Dream Walking (Dave Fleischer, USA, 1934)

The Mascot / Fétiche (Wladyslaw Starewicz, 1934)

The Joy of Living / La joie de vivre (Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin, France, 1934)

The Band Concert (Wilfred Jackson, USA, 1935)

Papageno (Lotte Reiniger, Germany, 1935)

Who Killed Cock Robin? (David Hand, USA, 1935)

Rainbow Dance (Len Lye, UK, 1936)

Clock Cleaners (Ben Sharpsteen, USA, 1938)

Escape (Mary Ellen Bute, USA, 1937)

The Little Match Girl (Arthur Davis, USA, 1937)

The Old Mill (Wilfred Jackson, USA, 1937)

Ferdinand the Bull (Dick Rickard, USA, 1938)

Porky in Wackyland (Bob Clampett, USA, 1938)

Peace on Earth (Hugh Harman, USA, 1939)

The 1940s

Mr. Duck Steps Out (Jack King, USA, 1940)

The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B” (Walter Lantz, USA, 1941)

The Night Before Christmas (Joseph Barbera & William Hanna, USA, 1941)

Rhapsody In Rivets (Friz Freleng, USA, 1941)

Blitz Wolf (Tex Avery, USA, 1942)

Der Fuehrer’s Face (Jack Kinney, USA, 1942)

Tulips Shall Grow (George Pal, USA, 1942)

Donald’s Tire Trouble (Dick Lundy, USA, 1943)

Education For Death (Clyde Geronimi, USA, 1943)

Porky Pig’s Feat (Frank Tashlin, USA, 1943)

Red Hot Riding Hood (Tex Avery, USA, 1943)

Weatherbeaten Melody / Scherzo – Verwitterte Melodie (Hans Fischerkoesen, Germany, 1943)

The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen / Abenteuer des Freiherrn. von Münchhausen: Eine Winterreise (Hans Held, Germany, 1944)

The Chimney Thief / Le voleur de paratonnerres (Paul Grimault, France, 1944)

Daffy Doodles (Robert McKimson, USA, 1946)

Kitty Kornered (Robert Clampett, USA, 1946)

The Cat Concerto (Joseph Barbera & William Hanna, USA, 1947)

King-Size Canary (Tex Avery, USA, 1947)

The Little Soldier / Le petit soldat (Paul Grimault, France, 1947)

Motion Painting No. 1 (Oskar Fischinger, USA, 1947)

Bad Luck Blackie (Tex Avery, USA, 1949)

Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1949)

High Diving Hare (Friz Freleng, USA, 1949)

Inspiration / Inspirace (Karel Zeman, Czechoslovakia, 1949)

The 1950s

Rabbit of Seville (Chuck Jones, USA, 1950)

Gerald McBoing Boing (Robert Cannon, USA, 1951)

Rooty Toot Toot (John Hubley, USA, 1951)

Neighbours (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1952)

Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, USA, 1953)

The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmelee, USA, 1953)

Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom (Ward Kimball & Charles A. Nichols, USA, 1953)

The Unicorn in the Garden (William T. Hurtz, USA, 1953)

One Froggy Evening (Chuck Jones, USA, 1955)

What’s Opera, Doc? (Chuck Jones, USA, 1957)

Free Radicals (Len Lye, UK, 1958)

House / Dom (Walerian Borowczyk & Jan Lenica, Poland, 1958)

The Tender Game (John Hubley, USA, 1958)

The Lion and the Song / Lev a písnicka (Bretislav Pojar, Czechoslovakia, 1959)

The 1960s

Little Tadpoles Search for Mama / Xiao ke dou zhao ma ma (Wei Te, China, 1960)

The Ash-Lad and the Good Helpers / Askeladden og de gode hjelperne (Ivo Caprino, Norway, 1961)

Surogat / Ersatz (Dusan Vukotic, Yugoslavia, 1961)

Story of a Certain Street Corner / Aru machikado no monogatari (Eiichi Yamamoto & Yusaku Sakamoto, Japan, 1962)

Labirynt (Jan Lenica, Poland, 1963)

Le nez / The Nose (Alexander Alexeieff & Claire Parker, France, 1963)

The Hangman (Paul Julian & Les Goldman, USA, 1964)

The Thieving Magpie / La gazza ladra (Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini, Italy, 1964)

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (Chuck Jones, USA, 1965)

Gymnopédies (Larry Jordan, USA, 1965)

The Hand / Ruka (Jirí Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1966)

My Green Crocodile / Moy zelenyy krokodil (Vadim Kurchevskiy, USSR, 1966)

The Seventh Father in the House / Sjuende far i huset (Ivo Caprino, Norway, 1966)

The Snowman / Snehulák (Hermína Týrlová, Czechoslovakia, 1966)

Curiosity / Znatizelja (Borivoj Dovnikovic, Yugoslavia, 1967)

Life in a Tin / Una vita in scatola (Bruno Bozzetto, Italy, 1967)

The Mitten / Varezhka (Roman Kachanov, USSR, 1967)

Ball of Yarn / Klubok (Nikolai Serebryakov, USSR, 1968)

Pas de deux (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1968)

Storytime (Terry Gilliam, UK, 1968)

Ballerina on the Boat / Balerina na korable (Lev Atamanov, USSR, 1969)

Walking / En marchant (Ryan Larkin, Canada, 1969)

Schody (Stairs) (Stefan Schabenbeck, Poland, 1969)

The 1970s

Film, Film, Film (Fyodor Khitruk, USSR, 1970)

Is It Always Right To Be Right? (Lee Mishkin, USA, 1970)

Pixillation (Lillian Schwartz, USA, 1970)

The Roll-Call / Apel (Ryszard Czekala, Poland, 1971)

The Battle of Kerzhenets / Secha pri Kerzhentse (Ivan Ivanov-Vano & Yuriy Norshteyn, 1971)

A Christmas Carol (Richard Williams, USA, 1971)

Evolution (Michael Mills, Canada, 1971)

How a Sausage Dog Works / Jak dziala jamniczek (Julian Józef Antonisz, Poland, 1971)

The Selfish Giant (Peter Sander, Canada, 1971)

Butterfly / Babochka (Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, USSR, 1972)

Tchou-Tchou (Co Hoedeman, Canada, 1972)

Coeur de secours (Piotr Kamler, France, 1973)

Frank Film (Caroline & Frank Mouris, USA, 1973)

Heavy-Light (Adam Beckett, USA, 1973)

Café Bar (Alison De Vere, UK, 1974)

Closed Mondays (Will Vinton, USA, 1974)

The Diary / Dnevnik (Nedeljko Dragic, Yugoslavia, 1974)

Fuji (Robert Breer, USA, 1974)

Great (Isambard Kingdom Brunel) (Bob Godfrey, UK, 1975)

Hedgehog in the Fog / Yozhik v tumane (Yuriy Norshteyn, USSR, 1975)

Dojoji Temple (Kihachiro Kawamoto, Japan, 1976)

Mindscape / Le paysagiste (Jacques Drouin, Canada, 1976)

The Street (Caroline Leaf, Canada, 1976)

The Bead Game (Ishu Patel, Canada, 1977)

Crane Feathers / Zhuravlinye per'ya (Ideya Garanina, USSR, 1977)

David (Paul Driessen, Netherlands, 1977)

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (Caroline Leaf, Canada, 1977)

Powers of Ten (Charles & Ray Eames, USA, 1977)

The Sand Castle / Le château de sable (Co Hoedeman, Canada, 1977)

Boy and Girl / Malchik i devochka (Rozaliya Zelma, USSR, 1978)

Poor Lisa / Bednaya Liza (Ideya Garanina, USSR, 1978)

Rowing Across the Atlantic / La Traversée de l'Atlantique à la rame (Jean

François Laguionie, France, 1978)

Satiemania (Zdenko Gasparovic, Yugoslavia, 1978)

Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, USA, 1979)

Every Child (Eugene Fedorenko, Canada, 1979)

Harpya (Raoul Servais, Belgium, 1979)

House of Flame/ Kataku (Kihachiro Kawamoto, Japan, 1979)

Tale of Tales/ Skazka skazok (Yuriy Norshteyn, USSR, 1979)

The 1980s

Fisheye/ Riblje oko (Josko Marusic, Yugoslavia, 1980)

The Three Inventors / Les 3 inventeurs (Michel Ocelot, France, 1980)

Tyll the Giant / Suur Tõll (Rein Raamat, USSR, 1980)

Who Will Comfort Toffle? / Vem skall trösta knyttet? (Johan Hagelbäck, Sweden, 1980)

The Circle / O kyklos (Iordanis Ananiadis, Greece, 1981)

The Fly / A Légy (Ferenc Rófusz, Hungary, 1981)

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Mark Hall, UK, 1981)

Skyscraper / Neboder (Josko Marusic, Yugoslavia, 1981)

Tango (Zbigniew Rybczynski, Poland, 1981)

Crac (Frédéric Back, Canada, 1981)

Block / Blok (Hieronim Neumann, Poland, 1982)

Dimensions of Dialogue / Moznosti dialogu (Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1982)

Ex Libris (Garik Seko, Czechoslovakia, 1982)

The Snowman (Dianne Jackson, UK, 1982)

There Once Was a Dog / Zhil-byl pyos (Eduard Nazarov, USSR, 1982)

Three Monks / San ge heshang (Jingda Xu (A Da), China, 1982)

The Vanished World of Gloves / Zaniklý svet rukavic (Jirí Barta, Czechoslovakia, 1982)

Esperalia (Jerzy Kalina, Poland, 1983)

Memories of War (Pierre Hébert, Canada, 1983)

Anna & Bella (Børge Ring, Netherlands, 1984)

The Dark Side of the Moon / Obratnaya storona luny (Aleksandr Tatarskiy, USSR, 1984)

Film-Wipe-Film (Paul Glabicki, USA, 1984)

Jumping (Osamu Tezuka, Japan, 1984)

There Will Come Soft Rains / Budet laskovyy dozhd (Nozim To'laho'jayev, USSR, 1984)

Paradise (Ishu Patel, Canada, 1985)

The Big Snit (Richard Condie, Canada, 1986)

Door / Dver (Nina Shorina, USSR, 1986)

George and Rosemary (David Fine & Alison Snowden, Canada, 1987)

How Wang-Fo Was Saved / Comment Wang-Fo fut sauvé (René Laloux, France, 1987)

Lodgers of an Old House / Zhiltsy starogo doma (Alexei Karev, USSR, 1987)

The Man Who Planted Trees / L’homme qui plantait des arbres (Frédéric Back, Canada, 1987)

Street of Crocodiles (Stephen & Timothy Quay, UK, 1987)

Your Face (Bill Plympton, USA, 1987)

The Cat Came Back (Cordell Barker, Canada, 1988)

Death and the Mother (Ruth Lingford, UK, 1988)

Face Like a Frog (Sally Cruikshank, USA, 1988)

Feelings of Mountains and Waters / Shan shui qing (Wei Te, China, 1988)

Pas à deux (Monique Renault & Gerrit van Dijk, Netherlands, 1988)

Prometheus’ Garden (Bruce Bickford, USA, 1988)

The Public Voice / Den offentlige røst (Lejf Marcussen, Denmark, 1988)

Walls / Sciany (Piotr Dumala, Poland, 1988)

Balance (Christoph Lauenstein & Wolfgang Lauenstein, West Germany, 1989)

The Cow / Korova (Aleksandr Petrov, USSR, 1989)

Darkness/Light/Darkness / Tma/Svetlo/Tma (Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1989)

The Hill Farm (Mark Baker, UK, 1989)

Knick Knack (John Lasseter, USA, 1989)

Mind the Steps! / Vigyázat, lépcsö! (István Orosz, Hungary, 1989)

The 1990s

Grasshoppers / Cavallette (Bruno Bozzetto, Italy, 1990)

Manipulation (Daniel Greaves, UK, 1991)

The Sandman (Paul Berry, UK, 1991)

Strings (Wendy Tilby, Canada, 1991)

When the Leaves Have Fallen Down from the Oak / Az opadá listí z dubu (Vlasta Pospísilová, Czechoslovakia, 1991)

Franz Kafka (Piotr Dumala, Poland, 1992)

Hotell E (Priit Pärn, Estonia, 1992)

Milk of Amnesia (Jeffrey Noyes Scher, USA, 1992)

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase (Joan C. Gratz, USA, 1992)

The Restaurant of Many Orders / Chumon no ooi ryori-ten (Tadanari Okamoto, Japan, 1993)

The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, UK, 1993)

Carmen Trilogy (Carmen Torero, Carmen Habanera, Carmen Suite) (Aleksandra Korejwo, Poland, 1994 – 1996)

Felix in Exile (William Kentridge, South Africa, 1994)

The Monk and the Fish / Le moine et le poisson (Michael Dudok de Wit, France, 1994)

Triangle (Erica Russell, UK, 1994)

Achilles (Barry Purves, UK, 1995)

Repete (Michaela Pavlátová, Czech Republic, 1995)

Famous Paintings / Beroemde schilderijen (Maarten Koopman, Netherlands, 1996)

Genre (Don Hertzfeldt, USA, 1996)

Quest (Tyron Montgomery, Germany, 1996)

Christmas / Rozhdestvo (Mikhail Aldashin, Russia, 1997)

Glassy Ocean / Kujira no Chouyaku (Shigeru Tamura, Japan, 1998)

More (Mark Osborne, USA, 1998)

The Old Lady and the Pigeons / La vieille dame et les pigeons (Sylvain Chomet, France, 1998)

The Old Man and the Sea (Aleksandr Petrov, Russia, 1999)

The 2000s

Adagio / Adazhio (Garry Bardin, Russia, 2000)

At the Ends of the Earth / Au bout du Monde (Konstantin Bronzit, France, 2000)

Le chapeau (Michèle Cournoyer, Canada, 2000)

Father and Daughter (Michael Dudok de Wit, UK/Belgium/Netherlands, 2000)

Tuning the Instruments / Strojenie instrumentów (Jerzy Kucia, Poland, 2000)

Aria (Pjotr Sapegin, Canada/Norway, 2001)

Black Soul / Âme noire (Martine Chartrand, Canada, 2001)

Cat Soup / Nekojiru-so (Tatsuo Sato, Japan, 2001)

Down to the Bone / Hasta los huesos (René Castillo, Mexico, 2002)

Dream Work (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2002)

A Summer Night Rendez-vous / Au premier dimanche d’août (Florence Miailhe, France, 2002)

Destino (Dominique Monfery, France/USA, 2003)

Fast Film (Virgil Widrich, Austria/Germany/Luxembourg, 2003)

Harvie Krumpet (Adam Elliot, Australia, 2003)

Rocks / Das Rad (Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel & Heidi Wittlinger, Germany, 2003)

Voices of a Distant Star / Hoshi no koe (Makoto Shinkai, Japan, 2003)

The Dream of an Old Oak / Quercus (Vuk Jevremovic, Germany, 2004)

The Man With No Shadow / L’Homme sans ombre (Georges Schwizgebel, Canada/Switzerland, 2004)

Ryan (Chris Landreth, Canada, 2004)

Brothers Bearhearts / Vennad Karusüdamed (Riho Unt, Estonia, 2005)

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (Anthony Lucas, Australia, 2005)

The Danish Poet (Torill Kove, Norway/Canada, 2006)

Dreams and Desires (Joanna Quinn, UK, 2006)

The Legend of Shangri-La (Chen Ming, China, 2006)

My Love / Moya lyubov (Aleksandr Petrov, Russia, 2006)

Never Like the First Time! / Aldrig som första gången! (Jonas Odell, Sweden, 2006)

Peter & the Wolf (Suzie Templeton, UK, 2006)

Printed Rainbow (Gitanjali Rao, India, 2006)

The Tale of How (The Blackheart Gang: Ree Treweek, Jannes Hendrikz & Markus Wormstorm, South Africa, 2006)

Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor / Kafuka: Inaka isha (Koji Yamamura, Japan, 2007)

False Aging (Lewis Klahr, USA, 2008)

The House of Small Cubes / La Maison en Petits Cubes / Tsumiki no ie (Kunio Katô, Japan, 2008)

My Childhood Mystery Tree (Natalia Mirzoyan, Russia, 2008)

Orgesticulanismus (Mathieu Labaye, Belgium, 2008)

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin, France, 2008)

This Way Up (Adam Foulkes & Alan Smith, UK, 2008)

Quimby the Mouse (Chris Ware, USA, 2009)

Invention of Love (Andrey Shushkov, Russia, 2010)

Pandane to Tamago-hime (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan, 2010)

Restart (Miao Xiaochun, China, 2010)

The Silence Beneath the Bark / Le silence sous l'écorce (Joanna Lurie, France, 2010)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (William Joyce & Brandon Oldenburg, USA, 2011)

Sure, You Can Film a Poem: Charles Bukowski’s “The Man with the Beautiful Eyes”

If you're reading this, chances are you don't read poetry too regularly (just a guess). You may even feel slight revulsion towards it, that mysterious, elusive presence in the literary spectrum, that stuff that sometimes rhymes, but most of the time just makes you scratch your head. That's okay! Be revulsed! Be confused! Any reaction is a good reaction.

If someone, like, say, me, or rather I, told you a poem could be filmed, you'd say, "No way!" And in part you might be right. The idea of a filmed poem conjures up a host of images, none of them pleasant: ever seen those placemats with scripture printed on them? Pastoral scenes? Clouds? Windswept plains? Pairs of footprints in the sand? Picture that as a film, with a voice-over by some out-of-work baritone. You get the idea. The concept of filming something without structure or narrative is a quicksand, just waiting for someone to step into it.

But fear not: various filmmakers, animators, and other pasty-faced, tired-looking souls have been hard at work for years, disproving this hypothesis, and the results of their experiments have been fine, indeed.

One of the first products I'll show you is a fairly safe bet: it's an animation of a poem by Charles Bukowski, and a much-beloved animation, at that.

Many people go through a Charles Bukowski phase: usually it's in your college years, when all you see is the openness, the directness, the humanity, and the humor of his poems; because his chronic alcoholism and self-destructive isolationism, along with his rampant misogyny and sexual degradation, seem romantic to you, you're not really able to analyze the quality of the work. He could say anything, literally anything, and you might think it was wonderful.

So you buy all of his books, and you drink a lot, because he did, and you keep reading him, and you keep talking about him, and you keep swapping favorite poem/favorite line stories with your friends, and then, eventually, you read something else. And then? In a year's time, maybe two, if you read enough, Bukowski becomes an "oh, yeah, him, whatever" author. The problem here is not his work, really, which was wildly inconsistent. It's also not the fact that you can cast him aside so easily. It's that the drunken bravado of a lot of his poems ultimately outshadowed what he was really good at, which was telling stories. That, and the fact that he was imprisoned by his style–but that's another blog post altogether. His numerous fictional works (Ham on Rye and Notes of a Dirty Old Man being notable examples) attest to the fact that his narrative impulse always competed with his poetic impulse; when the storyteller took the mike from the poet in his poems, the positive result was always noticeable.

"The Man with the Beautiful Eyes," cast remarkably here in bold, confidently drawn blacks and blues and reds and whites and grays by artist Jonny Hannah and animator Jonathan Hodgson, is a testament to Bukowski's elegant, perfect, utterly personal narrative ability. It's a gorgeous little movie, full of the fear and the wildness and the pure silliness and awfulness of reality that comprise childhood, presented in a rough-cut, aggressive, startling manner that suits Bukowski's work, and all in just over five minutes. It's not exactly new, having been first released in 2000, but if you haven't seen it, it will be a real discovery… Watch it, and see.

–Max Winter