Experimental Animation, a teaching compilation.  

The theme of the selection is the way individual artists challenge the prevailing conventions of what is really an industrial medium.
 
1. (excerpt) Thousand and One Nights a film fantasy made by the pioneer film maker Georges Melies (Star Films Paris); fly away scenery and camera trickery by the man who began as a musical hall conjuror.With modern video montage.

2. Steve Goldberg's Locomotive , Pacific Films, computer animation using models and images. A simple tale of railway engine who overcomes the odds. Sentimental. Shows the capacity of the computer to bend, twist and otherwise distort an image. 1989.

3. Chuck Jones, Daffy Duck (excerpt) , a strange de-constructive cartoon where the cartoon character responds directly to the animator (who in the end turns out to be Bugs Bunny). One of many brilliant and imaginative Warner Brothers cartoons.

4. Alison de Vere's Cafe Bar , a celebrated exercise in scale and metamorphosis.

5. Mr.Lanz and Mr.Bray , early experiments in animating human beings with drawings. Part of a long documentary of the birth of industrial scale animation.

6. Max Fleischer, Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat. The human basis of cartoon movement.

7. Jan Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue , an early piece of animation, a political metaphor that earned him official displeasure in communist Czechoslovakia.

8. Norman McClaren's Neighbours 1952 (excerpt), one of the National Film Board of Canada's humanistic films, with clever pixillation of the figure creeping jumping and messing about.

9. John Lassiter, making Tin Toy, computer animation without the flash and trivial, characterisation and lighting. The basis within human action.

10. Walt Disney, Cookie Carnival (excerpt) lively and innovative Silly Symphony, before he developed a sentimental quality of characterisation.

11. Quay Brothers, Street of Crocodiles, complete film, after the text by Bruno Schulz, a brilliant animation using models, real things, focus pulling etc. Sets, animation and writing by the Quays.

12. Technical aside, Disney's multi-plane camera to give the illusion of depth and three dimensions. The animator Ken O'Connor talking about perspective in Clock Cleaners (1937).

13. Tex Avery sideswipe at Disney's sentimental squirrels.

14. Jan Svankmajer, Dark Light Dark, complete film, plasticene modelling and real meat.

15. David Anderson, Dead Time Stories for Big Folk , with words written and spoken by Russell Hoban.Inventive, well told and well spaced apocalyptic narrative. Pixillation, sequences of photos in frames, model making and drawn effects at their very best.

ANIMATED GIFS FROM WIKIMEDIA OMMONS

A SELECTION

ZOOPRAXOSCOPES

MUYBRIDGE AND A SELF PORTRAIT

FILM AND THE NARRATIVE MENU

US ANIMIATION

CHRISTIES SALE, 1994 Art and Collectibles