I’m obsessed with animation…not enough to spend the time it takes to create it, but I’ve been a fan of all things ‘toon since my parents took Five-Year-Old Me to see a bootleg screening of the films featured in New York City’s 1974 animation festival. Many of the films weren’t appropriate for kids, but it was the ’70s.
I had no idea what was happening on the screen, but I loved every creepy, amazing moment.
I attended the first animation festival devoted to computer-generated animation in the early ’80s, and have attended nearly every animation festival within driving distance since then. Animation has come a long way, baby – especially computer animation – and to celebrate the thousands of unknowns and kind-of-knowns out there who are creating great work, I’ll be posting creepy, amazing animated shorts here on Tuesdays. I’ll also be commenting on some of the great animated shorts that aren’t available online – whether for copyright or other reasons – so stay, ahem, tooned.
We’ll kick TT off with an animated short that has been a favorite of mine since I came across it last year.
Benga – Baltimore Clap from Blink on Vimeo.
Pretty cool, huh? Creepy and amazing, indeed.
“Baltimore Clap” has popped up in several spots on the interwebnets – which isn’t troublesome, that’s what the webnets are for. Unfortunately, it has also been inappropriately claimed by several companies on Vimeo and YouTube (seriously uncool, guys – you know who you are). “Baltimore Clap” was, in fact, created by the London production company Blinkink.
Now that you’ve seen this clip, zip over to their site – just make sure you have at least an hour to kill, since you won’t want to leave until you’ve seen all of their videos. If you don’t have an hour, don’t fret; I’ll be posting other work from them here in the future.
