Scenes from Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s Philosophical, Feature-Length Animated Film (2001)

in Animation, Film, Philosophy | December 4th, 2014

Richard Lin­klater’s lat­est film Boy­hood has earned quite a lot of press by accom­plish­ing the unprece­dent­ed cin­e­mat­ic feat of telling a sto­ry over a decade long with a pro­duc­tion over a decade long, fol­low­ing the same char­ac­ters, played by the same grow­ing and aging actors, the whole time through. View­ers have under­stand­ably found it a strik­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence, but most of Lin­klater’s projects do some­thing no oth­er film has done before. His 1990s “Indiewood” break­out Slack­er (watch it online), for instance, offered not just the por­trait of the so-called Generation‑X, and not just a por­trait of the then-ris­ing Amer­i­can coun­ter­cul­tur­al Mec­ca of Austin, Texas, but a form of sto­ry­telling that seemed to drift freely from one char­ac­ter to the next, cross­ing town on the winds of idle, every­day, intense, and even non­sen­si­cal con­ver­sa­tion.

And what does Wak­ing Life do? Released in 2001, Lin­klater’s first ani­mat­ed film (he would make a sec­ond, the Philip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly, in 2006) not only fur­ther devel­ops the neglect­ed branch of ani­ma­tion known as roto­scop­ing, which involves draw­ing over live-action footage, but puts it to work for the cause of the philo­soph­i­cal film. But rather than approach­ing that enter­prise straight on, the movie inter­prets the phi­los­o­phy with which it deals through a vast cast of char­ac­ters both eccen­tric and mun­dane — intel­lec­tu­als, often, but also crack­pots, gad­flies, and just plain slack­ers. When they speak their thoughts aloud, as they do in the short clips fea­tured here, they speak on themes as var­ied, but as intrigu­ing­ly inter­con­nect­ed, as real­i­ty, free will, anar­chy, sui­cide, and cin­e­ma, all of which the ani­ma­tion vivid­ly illus­trates.

“Wak­ing Life could not come at a bet­ter time,” wrote Roger Ebert when the movie opened, less than a month after 9/11. “It cel­e­brates a series of artic­u­late, intel­li­gent char­ac­ters who seek out the mean­ing of their exis­tence and do not have the answers. At a time when mad­men think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an after­life, which is by def­i­n­i­tion unknow­able, those who don’t know the answers are the only ones ask­ing sane ques­tions. True believ­ers owe it to the rest of us to seek solu­tions that are rea­son­able in the vis­i­ble world.” Some view­ers will no doubt write off Wak­ing Life’s dia­logue — whether spo­ken by actors, pro­fes­sors, Lin­klater reg­u­lars, or utter ran­doms — as mere “dorm room con­ver­sa­tion,” but the film seems to ask an impor­tant ques­tion on that very point: are you real­ly hav­ing more inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions now than you did in the dorms?

If you have a sub­scrip­tion to Ama­zon Prime, you can watch Wak­ing Life for free right now. A ver­sion appears on Youtube for $2.99.

It’s also worth not­ing that Wak­ing Life appears on the list we recent­ly explored, 44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Watch The Idea, the First Ani­mat­ed Film to Deal with Big, Philo­soph­i­cal Ideas (1932)

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­ma­tion of Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

In Dark PSA, Direc­tor Richard Lin­klater Sug­gests Rad­i­cal Steps for Deal­ing with Tex­ters in Cin­e­mas

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Discover the 1950s & 1960s Computer & Cut-Up Animation of Pioneering Filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek

in Animation | December 3rd, 2014

Hey, lovers of ani­ma­tion and exper­i­men­tal film: do you know the name Stan Van­Der­Beek? If not, you’ll enjoy learn­ing it, for more rea­sons than that it allows you to type four cap­i­tal let­ters. End­less­ly adven­tur­ous in his quest to find new ways to craft (not to men­tion dis­play) mov­ing images, Van­Der­Beek, who in col­lege encoun­tered the likes of John Cage, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham, and Robert Rauschen­berg, mobi­lized for his ani­ma­tion a vari­ety of tech­nolo­gies that, in his day, peo­ple did­n’t have much of a sense of what to do with, artis­ti­cal­ly or oth­er­wise. “Every­thing that artists made art from, or with, in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, he pret­ty much touched,” this NPR piece quotes MIT LIST Visu­al Arts Cen­ter cura­tor Joao Ribas as say­ing about him. “The medi­um, what­ev­er he was work­ing with, was not ade­quate enough. Paint­ing was too sta­t­ic, and then one film was too lin­ear, and then four films were too cum­ber­some.”

You can see here some of the fruits of this dri­ve that kept Van­Der­Beek “con­stant­ly try­ing some­thing else that could get clos­er and clos­er to what he saw.” At the top, we have a 1966 exam­ple of the ani­mat­ed poet­ry he cre­at­ed with Bell Labs com­put­er graph­ics pio­neer Ken Knowl­ton, using a pro­gram­ming lan­guage of Knowl­ton’s own design and a score by jazz drum­mer Paul Mot­ian. But Van­Der­Beek built more of his rep­u­ta­tion with his mas­tery of cut-and-paste ani­ma­tion, the kind you see in action in 1959’s Sci­ence Fric­tion just above. Five years lat­er, he would put out Breathdeath below, which Tate calls “a sur­re­al fan­ta­sy based on 15th cen­tu­ry wood­cuts of The Dance of the Dead” made of “cut-up pho­tos and news­reels, reassem­bled into a black com­e­dy ded­i­cat­ed to Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton.” Does this all remind you a bit of Ter­ry Gilliam? It should. The Mon­ty Python ani­ma­tor, a notable Van­Der­Beek fan, named Breathdeath one of the best ani­mat­ed films of all time.

Find more exper­i­men­tal films in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Best Ani­mat­ed Films of All Time, Accord­ing to Ter­ry Gilliam

Watch 13 Exper­i­men­tal Short Films by Tezu­ka Osamu, the Walt Dis­ney of Japan

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Handmade Animation Shows You “How To Make a 1930 Paramount Record”

in Animation, Music | November 19th, 2014

The his­to­ry of Amer­i­can music—the blues, jazz, gospel, etc.—has been told, and sold, so many times over that it seems hard to jus­ti­fy yet anoth­er ret­ro­spec­tive. And yet, I for one am very hap­py to see the huge two-vol­ume box set The Rise & Fall of Para­mount Records appear on the scene. Grant­ed, I can’t cough up $800 for, in total, 1600 remas­tered dig­i­tal tracks, 12 LPs, 900 pages of artist bios, por­traits, discogra­phies, and ful­ly-restored adver­tise­ments from the Mid­west­ern musi­cal pow­er­house of the 20s and 30s. And that’s not to men­tion the beau­ti­ful, peri­od pack­ag­ing, “first-of-its-kind music and image play­er app… housed on cus­tom met­al USB dri­ve,” and more. But even those of us too skint to afford all the glo­ri­ous swag can sam­ple some of the fruit of the enor­mous labors that went into this joint pro­duc­tion of Jack White’s Third Man Records and folk gui­tar hero John Fahey’s Revenant Records (if only by proxy). And we can learn a lit­tle about the labors that went in to mak­ing the orig­i­nal records them­selves.

Paramount records label

Just above, we have a beau­ti­ful hand­made video by Kel­li Ander­son which “recre­ates the inner work­ings of the defunct Para­mount Records Fac­to­ry (where records by artists like Blind Lemon Jef­fer­son, Louis Arm­strong and Charley Pat­ton were pressed in the 1920s and ‘30s).” Made “entire­ly from paper atop a ply­wood set,” the stop-motion ani­ma­tion sim­u­lates the pro­duc­tion of Paramount’s “race records,” accom­pa­nied by Charley Patton’s 1930 “High Water Every­where, Part 1,” whose “thick, ana­log noise,” Ander­son writes on her blog, “is a reminder that some of history’s most inven­tive musi­cians were record­ed on the most infe­ri­or equip­ment of their day.” She quotes Dean Black­wood of Revenant, who writes that the Para­mount fac­to­ry “sat perched above the Mil­wau­kee Riv­er riverbed. Dirt from that riverbed was one of the key ingre­di­ents in their shel­lac dough, which was low­er on shel­lac con­tent and high­er on unex­pect­ed com­po­nents like riverbed clay, cot­ton flock, and lamp black.”

But from these hum­ble, dirty, cheap mate­ri­als came a sound like no other—one that can nev­er be dupli­cat­ed and which deserves the high­est qual­i­ty preser­va­tion. Just above, see a video trail­er for vol­ume 1 of the mas­sive box set, and read much more about this project at Third Man’s site (Vol­ume 1, Vol­ume 2).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Coun­try Fea­tures 114 Illus­tra­tions of the Artist’s Favorite Musi­cians

Mud­dy Waters, Howl­in’ Wolf, Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe & Oth­er Amer­i­can Blues Leg­ends Per­form in the UK (1963–66)

‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Hobo Blues’: Great Per­for­mances by John Lee Hook­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A History of Ideas: Animated Videos Explain Theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Aristotle & Other Philosophers

in Animation, Philosophy | November 17th, 2014

The UK’s Open Uni­ver­si­ty has become a depend­able source of very short, online video intro­duc­tions to all sorts of things, from weighty sub­jects like reli­gion, eco­nom­ics, and lit­er­ary the­o­ry to lighter, but no less inter­est­ing fare like the art and sci­ence of bike design. With breezy tone and seri­ous intent, their ani­mat­ed “60-Sec­ond Adven­tures” make seem­ing­ly arcane aca­d­e­m­ic ideas acces­si­ble to laypeo­ple with no pri­or back­ground. Now they’ve teamed up with writer and BBC broad­cast­er Melvyn Bragg of In Our Time fame for a series of video shorts that run just a lit­tle over 60 sec­onds each, with ani­ma­tions by Andrew Park of Cogni+ive, and nar­ra­tion by comedic actor Har­ry Shear­er from Spinal Tap, The Simp­sons, and, most recent­ly, Nixon’s the One.

Drawn from Bragg’s BBC 4 radio pro­gram “A His­to­ry of Ideas,” the shorts intro­duce exact­ly that—each one a pré­cis of a long­stand­ing philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem like Free Will vs. Deter­min­ism (top) or the Prob­lem of Evil (above). Unlike some sim­i­lar­ly rapid out­lines, these videos—like the tie-in Bragg radio program—don’t sim­ply sketch out the issues in abstract; they draw from spe­cif­ic approach­es from fields as diverse as neu­ro­science, moral phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­o­gy, and fem­i­nist the­o­ry. In the video on free will at the top, for exam­ple, Shear­er intro­duces us to the Libet exper­i­ments, per­formed in the 1980s by neu­rol­o­gist Ben­jamin Libet to test our abil­i­ty to make vol­un­tary, con­scious deci­sions. The “Free Will Defense” video above references—at least visu­al­ly—Bertrand Russell’s noto­ri­ous teapot in its rather skep­ti­cal pre­sen­ta­tion of this the­o­log­i­cal bug­bear.

Some of the videos get even more spe­cif­ic, focus­ing in on the work of one thinker whose con­tri­bu­tions are cen­tral to our under­stand­ing of cer­tain con­cepts. Just above in “Fem­i­nine Beau­ty,” we have an intro­duc­tion to exis­ten­tial philoso­pher Simone de Beauvoir’s argu­ment that fem­i­nine beau­ty, and gen­der pre­sen­ta­tion more gen­er­al­ly, is social­ly con­struct­ed by pre­vail­ing patri­ar­chal norms—a con­cept cen­tral to the fem­i­nist work of lat­er thinkers like Judith But­ler. And below, we have the 18th cen­tu­ry con­cept of the “Sub­lime,” a sup­pos­ed­ly high­er, more threat­en­ing and inef­fa­ble aes­thet­ic mode, as dis­cussed in the work of con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal philoso­pher Edmund Burke (also a sub­ject dear to Immanuel Kant, who had his own take on the idea).

See more “A His­to­ry of Ideas” short, ani­mat­ed videos—including “Diotima’s Lad­der,” “The Gold­en Ratio,” and “The Harm Prin­ci­ple”—on Youtube or the BBC Radio 4 site. The scripts for the clips, we should add, were writ­ten by Nigel War­bur­ton, whose Phi­los­o­phy Bites pod­cast you should nev­er miss.

And for much more exten­sive dis­cus­sions of these age-old philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions with real liv­ing “philoso­phers, the­olo­gians, lawyers, neu­ro­sci­en­tists, his­to­ri­ans and math­e­mati­cians,” down­load episodes of Melvyn Bragg’s “A His­to­ry of Ideas” show here or on iTunes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

120+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

“Hei­deg­ger in the Kitchen”: Alain de Botton’s Video Essay Explains the Philosopher’s Con­cept of Being

8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy: Pla­to, Sartre, Der­ri­da & Oth­er Thinkers Explained With Vin­tage Video Games

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Pod­cast Still Going Strong

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Yoga in an X‑Ray Machine

in Animation | October 27th, 2014

Cour­tesy of Hybrid Med­ical Ani­ma­tions comes a high-tech “visu­al study/exploration of the body in motion.” The goal of the ani­ma­tion was to cre­ate a real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of x‑rays, while also cap­tur­ing the beau­ty of var­i­ous yoga pos­es. Looks like they hit the mark on both accounts.

In cre­at­ing this 3D ani­ma­tion, no x‑rays were actu­al­ly used. No one was exposed to radi­a­tion in any way, shape or form. It’s all just ani­ma­tion — sophis­ti­cat­ed ani­ma­tion that some­how man­ages to show “prop­er bone den­si­ties and rep­re­sent actu­al bone mar­row inside each indi­vid­ual bone.” If you prac­tice yoga, you’ll cer­tain­ly rec­og­nize some of the pos­es in the clip.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Son­ny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Prac­tic­ing Yoga Made Him a Bet­ter Musi­cian

Watch a New Music Video Shot Entire­ly With­in an MRI Machine

What Hap­pens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitch­cock: The Neu­ro­science of Film

This is Your Brain on Sex and Reli­gion: Exper­i­ments in Neu­ro­science

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

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Night on Bald Mountain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pinscreen Animation Based on Mussorgsky’s Masterpiece (1933)

in Animation, Music | October 16th, 2014

If you read Open Cul­ture reg­u­lar­ly, I imag­ine I can safe­ly call Alexan­der Alex­eieff and Claire Park­er your favorite France-based, Russ­ian-Amer­i­can hus­band-wife pin­screen ani­ma­tion team. Dare I pre­sume to refer to them as your favorite pin­screen ani­ma­tors, peri­od? We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured two exam­ples of their time- and labor-devour­ing but utter­ly dis­tinc­tive ani­ma­tion tech­nique: their eerie open­ing to Orson Welles’ adap­ta­tion of Kafka’s The Tri­al, and their own daz­zling adap­ta­tion of Gogol’s short sto­ry “The Nose.” Alex­eieff and Park­er’s trip to the Gogol well reflects their pen­chant for the imag­i­na­tive cre­ators of Alex­eief­f’s home­land. The film we present here draws its inspi­ra­tion not from a Russ­ian writer, but from the Russ­ian com­pos­er Mod­est Mus­sorgsky, him­self an enthu­si­as­tic incor­po­ra­tor of his coun­try’s lore and tra­di­tions.

You cer­tain­ly know at least one work of Mus­sorgsky’s: Night on Bald Moun­tain, which he wrote ear­ly in his career but which nev­er saw a full orches­tral debut until 1886, five years after his death. Over half a cen­tu­ry after that, the piece found a much wider audi­ence through its use in Walt Dis­ney’s Fan­ta­sia. For many, that inter­sec­tion of Mus­sorgsky and Mick­ey Mouse will remain the finest exam­ple of clas­si­cal music unit­ed with ani­ma­tion, but have a look at how Alex­eieff and Park­er did it — in 1933, no less, sev­en years before Fan­ta­sia — and see what Car­toon Research’s Steve Stanch­field calls “one of the most unusu­al and unique look­ing ani­mat­ed films ever cre­at­ed.” It presents, he writes, “both delight­ful and at times hor­ri­fy­ing imagery, a stream of con­scious­ness bar­rage of images that chal­lenge the view­er to com­pre­hend both their mean­ing and the mys­tery of how they were cre­at­ed.”

To my four-year-old self, Fan­ta­sia seemed pret­ty scary too, but Alex­eieff and Park­er have, on their pin­screen, tak­en things to a whole oth­er psy­cho­log­i­cal lev­el. Near­ly forty years lat­er, they would use the music of Mussko­r­gy again to cre­ate 1972’s French-lan­guage Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion. They would make anoth­er, Trois Themes, in 1980, but it appears lost to time, at least for the moment. Have we made you into the kind of pin­screen ani­ma­tion enthu­si­ast who might unearth it? You can view their pin­screen ani­ma­tion of Night on Bald Moun­tain on YouTube.


Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Kafka’s Para­ble “Before the Law” Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles & Illus­trat­ed with Great Pin­screen Art

Two Beau­ti­ful­ly-Craft­ed Russ­ian Ani­ma­tions of Chekhov’s Clas­sic Children’s Sto­ry “Kash­tan­ka”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Adventures of Famed Illustrator Gustave Doré Presented in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Animation

in Animation, Art | October 10th, 2014

When we fea­tured his illu­mi­na­tion of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” we called Gus­tave Doré “one of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th cen­tu­ry,” who “made his name illus­trat­ing works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Mil­ton, and Dante.” His hand may have giv­en a visu­al dimen­sion to a num­ber of revered texts, but what of the man him­self? For the deep­est insight into an artist, we should look to the works of art he inspires. In the case of the cutout ani­mat­ed film above, Doré not only pro­vides the inspi­ra­tion but plays, in a sense, the star­ring role. L’imaginaire au pou­voir offers us a por­trait of the artist as a two-dimen­sion­al man, stum­bling into haunt­ing drawn-and-cut-out realms straight from his own imag­i­na­tion.

“The film was cre­at­ed by Vin­cent Piani­na and Loren­zo Papace of Le Petit Écho Malade and fea­tures music by Ödland,” writes EDW Lynch at Laugh­ing Squid (a site that pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Le Petit Écho Malade’s music video for Ödland’s “Øster­søen”) “It is a pro­mo, Lynch adds, for ‘Gus­tave Doré (1832–1883): Mas­ter of Imag­i­na­tion,’ an ongo­ing exhi­bi­tion of Doré’s work at Musée d’Orsay in Paris through May 11, 2014.” Though Doré, by all accounts, lived a fair­ly event­ful life, he had to have spent a great deal of it slav­ing painstak­ing­ly away with his wood engrav­ing tools. The same goes for any pro­duc­er of such vivid artis­tic visions—but I sus­pect that all of them have to go on this kind of har­row­ing jour­ney to the cen­ter of their soul now and again. Here, Piani­na and Papace have, with Doré’s very mate­ri­als, cre­at­ed a jour­ney into the inner realm that still gives them life today. And they’ve added a healthy dose of 21st-cen­tu­ry humor for good mea­sure.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ter­ry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions: A 1974 How-To Guide

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Vin­tage Film: Watch Hen­ri Matisse Sketch and Make His Famous Cut-Outs (1946)

Gus­tave Doré’s Dra­mat­ic Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Gus­tave Doré’s Exquis­ite Engrav­ings of Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986)

in Animation | September 26th, 2014

Stephen King has that rare, and spec­tac­u­lar­ly prof­itable, skill to suck you into his world and com­pel you to flip to the next page. And when you’re hooked, his words have the uncan­ny abil­i­ty to sim­ply unfold like a movie in your head. So it isn’t sur­pris­ing that his books have been wide­ly adapt­ed to the sil­ver screen. Some are flat out mas­ter­pieces. Oth­ers are most decid­ed­ly not. This appre­ci­a­tion by film­mak­ers of King’s sto­ry­telling chops isn’t just con­tained to this side of the Iron Cur­tain. In 1986, Sovi­et ani­ma­tor Mikhail Titov — whose pre­vi­ous work includes How the Cos­sacks Played Foot­ball (1970) — turned King’s short sto­ry “Bat­tle­ground” (1972) into an ani­mat­ed movie, titled sim­ply Сражение or Bat­tle.

The short is about a noirish hired gun who dress­es in a trench coat and a fedo­ra and bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance to Vladimir Putin. He is con­tract­ed to kill a toy mak­er. When he returns home, he dis­cov­ers that there’s a box on his doorstep and makes the com­plete­ly unwise deci­sion of tak­ing it inside. Soon, toy sol­diers start to tum­ble out of the box. They have live ammo, rock­et launch­ers, tiny lit­tle heli­copters at their dis­pos­al and they are on a sin­gle-mind­ed mis­sion to kill him. The killer soon finds him­self pinned down in bath­room, wait­ing for the next attack.

The film is a lot of fun. Titov relies heav­i­ly on roto­scop­ing – an ani­ma­tion tech­nique you prob­a­bly remem­ber from A‑ha’s music video Take On Me. The killer’s form and move­ments feel real­is­tic as the rest of the movie’s height­ened, brood­ing world bends and bulges as if ren­dered through a fish­eye lens. And like A‑ha, the film’s synth and sax­o­phone sound­track might sound painful­ly 80s to some. You can watch Bat­tle with sub­ti­tles above or with­out sub­ti­tles below. The dia­logue is min­i­mal through­out.

Bat­tle will be added to our list of Free Ani­ma­tions, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Comes Soft Rain’

Enjoy 15+ Hours of the Weird and Won­der­ful World of Post Sovi­et Russ­ian Ani­ma­tion

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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