A Brief Disagreement

2022

★★★½ Liked Watched

Jeeeeeeebus.

The Last Seed

2024

★★★½ Liked Watched

A robot cowboy on an unidentified planet sacrifices its life to save the last seed, a Groot-like conscious plant being that escape the evil Pteranodons and starts new life on a new planet. Short, pointed, beautiful and meaningful.

Wire Cutters

2014

★★★½ Liked Watched

When you are rooting for the two dystopian-era mining robots to work together to find the minerals, and get depressed because greed destroys their partnership (and themselves), you know you might have stumbled onto a metaphor of something or other.

Lands of Steel

2024

★★★ Watched

CHAPPiE meets I Am Legend in this dystopian animated horror short. Effective.

Boom

2022

★★★ Liked Watched

a hilarious animated short which dares to ask the question: what if Ice Age met the LOTR, but just the bit at the end when Mordor is destroyed?

French Roast

2008

★★★½ Liked Watched

A beautifully rendered animated short about a wealthy man, a nun, and a homeless man in a cafe. The moral is fairly straightforward and expected, but still well done, comical, and wonderfully animated. You can almost taste and smell the coffee.

Happiness

2017

★★★★ Liked Watched

An animated short in which a society of rats desperately pursues happiness through consumption, entertainment, addiction, and work. An explosively short but powerful metaphor of the human condition.

The Turning Point

2020

★★★★ Liked Watched

Whoa. An animated short in which animals play the part of humans, engaging in typical late-modern human activities, leading to the extinction of homo sapiens, who play the part of animals in the world today. Quick, brutal and effective messaging.

Kubo and the Two Strings

2016

★★★½ Watched

Kubo defeats his grandfather the Moon King with an epic guitar solo.

The Pied Piper

1985

★★★½ Liked Watched

Stop-motion Czechoslovakian rats employed as a dark metaphor for the evils of capitalism. What more do you need to know? Oh, is it also entirely in a disturbing made-up language? Yes, yes it is.

Birdboy: The Forgotten Children

2015

★★½ Watched

Holy crap. Ren and Stimpy meets Requiem for a Dream, with a dash of Godzilla and the soundtrack of the German series Dark. In Spanish.

Wolfwalkers

2020

★★★★ Liked Watched

Set in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1650, this is Irish Studio Cartoon Saloon’s third animated story focused on Irish folklore, the first two being The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea. This story revolves around the interaction of humans and wolves at the time of Cromwell’s disastrous Lord Protectorate over Ireland. The Lord Protector wants to tame the land and to tame the forests, and needs to wipe out the resistance of both the Irish and the wolves. An…