Sublime Pleasure

[elfs]

jatg, in a recent post, points out after some studios make a serious misstep with their animation that, "they fail to realize that animation is NOT a genre. It is a medium and it always, ALWAYS comes down to story, story, story."

She also talks about how insanely easy it is to make a movie these days. In that vein, I offer the following six minute short by "Imperial Boy": Rain, the Little Girl, and My Letter. (Yah, that's a torrent. And the container is Matroska. Get used to the new weirdness already.) The character designs are a little rough but they are hand-drawn. The backgrounds are computer graphics over hand-drawn frames, and the whole work is quite beautiful. And the story is the centerpiece, which is what makes it fun.

You have to go through it a second time and pause it, just to appreciate the amount of work he puts into his mechanical design: the clock, the teakettle, the bridge, are all beautiful in their own right. His website is a mix of rough studies, all of which show a very creative mind at work. I was reasonably impressed that one man could put this all together so effectively.