- I’m a sucker for anything remotely twee, so Helium Harvey is right up my street. The three-minute animated short from Daniel Savage follows a young boy on an imaginative, balloon-fueled journey across the globe. The imagery is gorgeously retro, turning the simple story into something quite magical. If you’re up for something sweet, take a look at the film here.
- For something just as cute but a little darker, check out Russian Roulette, Ben Aston’s five-minute film about a sad young woman who encounters a similarly lonely space-dwelling Russian cosmonaut on Chat Roulette. Aston keeps the camera tight on his characters, and he’s not afraid to take things in a decidedly icky direction, taking a rather saccharine story and grounding it in reality. The film can be found here.
- Moving even further into creepy territory, Richard Hickey’s Francis, a seven-minute animated film based on a short story by Dave Eggers, is both beautifully rendered and fantastically paced. Essentially a ghost story, it tells the tale of a young girl who goes out on an Ontario lake in the middle of the night and happens upon something terrifying. Hickey combines gorgeous 3D animation with a fabulously spooky score and crisp narration, and the result is both frightening and captivating. See it here.
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