Partly Cloudy: A Lonely Cloud Creates Hazardous Babies for His Stork-Partner

Partly Cloudy is a delightful animated short film by Pixar Animation Studios, which was named as one of 10 films to advance in the voting process for the “Animated Short Films” category for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards.  The list is international, with movies representing production companies from Australia, France, America, Canada and other countries.

In Partly Cloudy, the storks get their babies from way up high in the stratosphere, where cloud people sculpt babies from clouds and bring them to life.  However, in this story there is a real dilemma.  Gus, a lonely and insecure gray cloud, is a master at creating “dangerous” babies: crocodiles, porcupines, rams and even much worse.  Gus’s beloved creations are truly works of art, but they’re more than a handful for his loyal delivery-stork partner, Peck.  As Gus’s creations become more and more rambunctious, Peck’s job gets harder and harder.  How on earth will Peck manage to handle both his hazardous cargo and his friend’s fiery temperament?

Partly Cloudy: A Lonely Cloud Creates Hazardous Babies for His Stork-Partner

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Dreaming of Lucid Living: A Fascinating Performance/Animation Mash-Up

Dreaming of Lucid Living is a short film that’s a remarkable, beautiful performance/animation mash-up by the award-winning animator, designer and multi-media artist Miwa Matreyek. The film is a performance/installation piece constructed like a shadow puppet theater, integrating Matreyek’s solo live performance, nicely composed visuals and animation in a way that is both poetic and quite quirky.  It combines live performance with both pre-made animations  and semi-autonomous, rule based animations that appear to update based upon what a camera is viewing.  The film’s presentation of deceptively simple, deliciously playful illusions, a high-spirited sense of wonder, and creatively unexpected mixtures of live action and animation is just incredible.  I’ve never seen anything quite like this ever before.

Dreaming of Lucid Living: A Fascinating Performance/Animation Mash-Up

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A Backbone Tale: The Beauty of Ugliness

Une Histoire Vertebrale (A Backbone Tale) is an award-winning short animated film by Jérémy Clapin, which in the classic comic tradition manages to be sadly touching, romantic and funny.  In our eternal race to find love and happiness, some unfortunate souls start with a handicap, as is the case of the sad little man we join in this film.  A malformation of his backbone forces our hero to walk with his head held low, permanently fixed toward the ground.

How on earth is he supposed to search for happiness, to find his loved one, when all that his eyes can see are his own little feet?  And who’s going love him, someone who looks so sad, terribly lonely, and very different from other people?  The emotional state of this poor little fellow, his loneliness and quest to find another human being like him, reveals a profound analysis of the alienation and frustration of people: man needs to live with other men.

A Backbone Tale: The Beauty of Ugliness

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Yellow Cake: A Modern Parable of Terrorism and Devastating War

Yellow Cake is a short animated film by the award-winning Canadian animator Nick Cross.  Cross explains that he got the idea for the film in 2003, in light of speculation during the Bush administration that Iraq was buying uranium powder called “Yellow Cake.”  Yellow Cake Uranium was one of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Iraq allegedly possessed.  Cross’s fantastic animated epic becomes a modern parable of terrorism and catastrophic war, a lamentable tragedy featuring geopolitical bullying, social unrest and worker revolt. In the end, as with most revolutions, the revolt is both crushed by foreign intervention and corrupted from the inside until it becomes as evil as the regime the workers had originally fought.

Yellow Cake initially lures the viewer into a tale of pleasant mirth, filled with adorable blue creatures who spend all day baking and then eating their own  exquisitely delicious yellow cakes.  However, by the end of the film the small town of happy little bakers has been driven to terrorism by the greed of their leader and cake-hungry fat cats, resulting in the town’s ultimate catastrophic destruction.  It seems that no matter what they do, the oppressed have no hope left.

Yellow Cake: A Modern Parable of Terrorism and Devastating War

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