While browsing the Electric Picnic forums, I came across some YouTube material from Monkey Dust - some of the best stuff I’ve seen YouTubed in a long while now.

Monkey Dust is a very black humoured animation series that deals with some fairly sensitive material - in a very insensitive way, but it does it exceptionally well.

One article I read about Monkey Dust quoted the Observer as saying:

A piece of genuinely brilliant programming. Damn, it feels good to be treated like a grown-up for once. Monkey Dust alone has justified the existence of BBC Three. Dark, compelling and utterly unmissable television.

It seems the principal creators, and writers are Harry Thompson and Shaun Pye but the animation is outsourced to a variety of animation firms and animators, resulting in the bizarrely successful visual mixmatch of styles.

Other writers and directors are involved heavily also, which probably explains how so much material is packed into every episode that I’ve seen, and how it stays fresh.

The show often contains stuff which I’m retiscent to embed here, such as sex scenes and extreme violence, but I highly recommend watching them if you’re not sensitive to such stuff - the rating on the DVD is 15s.

One character, who sticks in the mind, to me typifies the type of humour on Monkey Dust is the ‘PaedoFinder General’ who essentially without needing to go through any kind of justice system, subjects suspected paedophiles to trial by media and executes them.

by the power vested in my by a sky news text vote…

Monkey Dust season one is available on Amazon.co.uk and I believe the other two seasons are available through BitTorrent, but I don’t have url’s for the downloads.

There’s a lot of Monkey Dust stuff on YouTube worth watching, I particularly liked this excerpt - it has a good mix of stuff in it, watch for the fairy tale at the end, but be warned it’s got good amounts of sex and violence in it!

More info on Monkey Dust from Wikipedia

I’ll leave you with this clip - The Diary of Ann Frank:

Fifty Percent Grey by Ruairi Robinson, listed in Laboratory101’s 20 of the most amazing short animations you need to see before you die. I haven’t watched them all but, going by the ones I have seen, it’s a fairly worthy list. I’m sure I could dig up a few more that are worthy of mention but you’ll say that about any list. Maybe someday Building A House will be fondly remembered in this way.

JibJab’s year in review. Not a patch on This Land, the one that really launched them, but nice all the same.

Brilliant editing of classic cartoons to fit with extracts from the communist manifesto. Unfortunately the guys voice is a monotonous drone… to go to all this trouble and not get a great voiceover seems such a shame.
Still, well worth watching - I have the Penguin Great Ideas book of the Communist Manifesto sitting on my shelf for about a year , at least now I can pretend to have read some of it!

Just came across Blur Studios, they have four short animations that are really worth watching. Especially ‘Gopher Broke’ and ‘Rockfish’. You can watch all their films on their own site in Quicktime, or they’re all up on YouTube as well.

Aunt Luisa - their first short, shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2002. Nice idea, but overall the weakest of the four.

Rockfish - Their second short, again shortlisted for an Academy Award. Great watch.

Gopher Broke was actually nominated for an academy award. You can see why, great animation and pretty funny too. Possibly my favourite of the four.

In The Rough - Their current short. Amazing animation. A little weak on story maybe… something’s missing that stops it from being incredible, which you kind of feel it should be.