If you’re really into drawn animation, there are two shorts programs that seems to be pretty much comprised of this:

Fire and Ice: New Animation from Russia (Jan 28 at 3pm, Feb 4 at 3:30pm, 51 minutes): This is a program of 9 shorts, none older than 2002. All seem to be drawn, except for this one which is told with buttons (!):

and Fright Delight (Jan 29 at 1:30pm, Feb 1 at 7pm, Feb 4 at 5:30pm, 67 minutes): Scary films for ages 9 and up.

If you’re more into stop-motion with objects and puppets rather than drawn, there is a program for little little kids called  Touch My Heart: Gentle Films on the Big Screen (Jan 27 at 11am, Feb 5 at 11am) that has a knitted film, one made with cardboard, and a few other stop-motion.

Birds of a Feather (Jan 29 at 1pm, Feb. 4 at 11am) also has many stop-motion and drawn shorts.

These are the ones with the MOST stop-motion, but truth be told, every single shorts program (11 altogether!) has a least one or two stop-motion animations. So go out and catch them!

The other big animation is the opening night feature, and here is my rant about that:

I’m torn. I absolutely loved Micel Ocelot‘s ‘Princes et Princesses‘ when I first stumbled upon it in my university library seven or eight years ago. It was a fun film, a short film, but a long one, if I recall correctly, composed of vignettes of a girl and a boy play-acting different fairy tales. It was made in a Lotte Reiniger style of back-lit cut-outs, and they were ingenious, and moved beautifully. Then Ocelot made ‘Azur et Asmar‘ a computer animated feature that echoed his two dimensional cut-out style.
It was ok. Not great. There were some fun moments, but overall I found the story went downhill two thirds of the way through and I was disappointed with the animation. What a waste, I thought! Surely he has now learned that he should not have strayed from the simplicity and grace of his stop-motion technique! Alas, that was not to be. His latest film is called ‘Tales of the Night‘ (Les Contes de la Nuit) and it will open the Children’s Film Festival at the Northwest Film Forum tomorrow (Jan 26th) at 7PM.
From what I can tell, it seems to be very much inspired by his short Princes et Princesses, except it focuses on one fairy tale and is longer. He is using computer animation to closely imitate his stop-motion technique, and maybe the restriction of the having the figures silhouetted will reign in the temptation to go CG-crazy. But you decide! I’ve included below clips or trailers from all three films.

Princes et Princesses

Azur et Asmar

Tales of the Night

Related show

• Event or Artist: SEAT: Inter-Action – a collection of animated shorts
• Date: Wednesday, February 1st 2012
• Time: 8:00pm
• City: SEAT: Inter-Action – a collection of animated shorts in Seattle
• Venue: Naked City Brewery
• Address: 8564 Greenwood Ave. N
• Country: United States
• Admission: FREE
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

Still from Plain Face (2011)

Starting February 2nd you’ll be able to see Plain Face, Tess Martin’s animated short that premiered at SIFF in May, on the big beautiful monitors of 4Culture’s media gallery, e4C. A reception at 4Culture will mark the launch on February 2nd, and is part of Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Art Walk. Stay tuned for more details about this event, but in the meantime, mark your calendars! Plain Face will be screening on the monitors (on rotation with others artists’ work) for a full year! Check out this video about e4C where Tess talks about one of her previous pieces, A Moment’s Reverie, that was on there from 2009 to 2010:

And here are the deets:

Naked City Brewery
8564 Greenwood Ave N
Seattle, WA 98103
Wednesday January 18th, 8:00PM
FREE

Program is 75 minutes and includes Tess Martin‘s short Plain Face, Stefan Gruber‘s Both Worlds, Drew Christie’s The Man Who Shot the Man Who Lincoln, and Bruce Bickford‘s The Comic That Frenches Your Mind!

This last one WILL blow your mind, guaranteed (wait, I didn’t mean it like that….)

Not to mention shorts by the talented Britta Johnson, Amanda Moore, Salise Hughes, Davis Limbach, Aaron Wendel, Sarah Jane Lapp, Clyde Petersen and Webster Crowell!

Keep up to date with SEAT stuff through the SEAT FB page:
http://www.facebook.com/experimentalanimation

Films and Music, interactive event.

Clyde Petersen is a local animator and musician. The longest lasting member of Seattle based band Your Heart Breaks, Clyde uses a loop station to create lush songs about travel, adoration, and outer space. In addition, he is a transgender artist and teacher, creating music videos and short animated films for his company, Do it for the Girls Productions. Your Heart Breaks is queercore & hot makeout parties. The place where unicorn and pegasus combine into one. Corndogs [2 for 99 cents]. Pinata parties. Dancing up front at all-ages shows. Sharing the mic. Monkeys, the squirrels of south america. Squirrels, the monkeys of north america. A severe case of ocean waves.

Tender Forever is an “Alien With Extraordinary Abilities” who will entertain you, make you experience feelings about yourself and others, sing to you out loud what you softly think and everlastingly stamp your memory with unforgettable joyful and epic souvenirs. In this new performance, Tender Forever takes us on a musical multimedia journey to explore her own perspectives on the concepts of origin and world citizenship, survival and the abundance of our computerized world through her unique whimsical lens.

From Tess Martin: Check out these snapshots of my animation stand today – the waves are part of the credits for the film I’m working on, The Whale Story. It’s almost finished and I’ll be screening what I have at the Capitol Hill Art Walk on January 12th. More on that soon. The bulk of this film was shot with the help of SEAT in Cal Anderson Park as part of the Wallrus project.

Still from A Moment's Reverie (2007) by Tess Martin

I’m happy to announce that one of my films has made it onto my vimeo channel – in full! It’s 10 minutes long, enjoy!

http://vimeo.com/34441229

To learn more about it, click here.

Britta Johnson is back from her excursions into the regional landscape with a series of animations. Experiments in scale, gesture, substance, and time, these looping videos will be shown one at a time over 3 days at the Northwest Film Forum.

December 14: Finding Nothing To Do, Doing Something #1
December 15: Holding Pattern #2
December 16: Snow Angels

The pieces will play from 10 am to 6 pm in Cinema 2.

This work was made with a CityArtist award from the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, as well as support from Artist Trust, Centrum, and the Northwest Film Forum.