Thanks to Green Ink for pointing me in the direction of the Moomins.

When he mentioned them in reference to my interest in animation, I thought they sounded familiar. I did a search on YouTube and found the above episode, and ineed they also looked familiar. But only in a vague fuzzy way.

And I wasn’t entirely sure that it was animation I remembered, which is entirely possibly because it seems they started life in print. Author Tove Jansson from Finland wrote Moomin books and comics , it seems, before they were turned into a series and a film.

Wherever I came across them, I think they stuck in my conscious somewhere as being just barely the right side of scary for whatever age I was.

As you can see from the above clip, they are fairly unconventional - is there anything this edgy around for kids at the moment? I’m a little out of touch, but Spongebob Squarepants is comparable I suppose… in that it’s enjoyable by adults as well as children, and tends toward the absurd - but let’s face it, Spongebob lacks a certain class that the Moomins have.

Or will people look back on Spongebob and think it’s got class when the media of the time has further increased in pace and crassness.

Anyway, enough rambling, enjoy the gentle insanity of the Moomins.

Simple, cute and effective animation in a music video for a song by some French bloke called Ridan.

Myself and Emmet have been talking about how we should really do some stuff using techniques something akin to this (simple 2d animation enhanced by some cool compositing), only much much better of course. Because we’re brilliant.

If I were you, I wouldn’t hold my breath just yet though… I promised a band I would do a music video for them about three years ago.. it’s still not done… (Sorry Declan).

Beautiful animation of a beautiful poem. The voice is that of the poem’s author, Billy Collins, an American poet who I had never heard of before. Unsurprising, really, since I haven’t heard of most poets.

Apparently Billy Collins recorded himself reading some of his poems and then released the recordings under a Creative Commons licence. The animation suits the poem incredibly well and Collins’ voice is great.

The poem starts out quite amusing, but seems to simultaneously grow more prophetically ominous and sympathetic, and leaves you wondering about the future of your own memories and perhaps thinking about people you have known whose memories failed them increasingly.

I may have mentioned previously that I’m a fan of William Burroughs. Here’s some Burroughs bizarreness to brighten up your day. Ah Pook, written and narrated by Burroughs himself and directed by Philip Hunt.

Watch Ah Pook in high quality on Philip Hunt’s site Studio AKA, or if you’re really lazy it’s embedded below in the usual YouTube low quality.

The soundtrack you will hear on the animation originally featured on ‘Dead City Radio‘, which was produced by Hal Willner (he recently put together Came So Far For Beauty - the Leonard Cohen Tribute concert) and Nelson Lyon, and the music on the album was by John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, and Sonic Youth. I don’t know who exactly plays on this track, but that sure sounds John Cale-ish to me.

Great animated gif. You don’t see many animated gifs these days, what with YouTube and the like taking over the world… who needs crappy gif animations when you can have web cam girls lip synching to Britney?

So it’s kind of nice when you stumble on a gif animation worth watching these days. I don’t know when this was actually made of course, but I like to think there’s this guy who refuses to bow to YouTube, and he slaves away in his basement hand drawing these things pixel by pixel in MS Paint or something.

Two colours, no sound, and look what the artist achieves. Amazing.

I found it on gprime.net and there are several others, some of which look like they were done by the same guy.