Animated Reactions: A Few of Our Favorite Shorts

The Maryland Film Festival unspooled in Baltimore
in recent days, and notably, the lineup included several
films by one of my favorite short-form animators, Bill Plympton.

I've been an avid fan of Plympton's color-pencil lines since the Oscar nominee's work would pop up in the Spike&Mike Animation Festival, when it traversed the Left Coast in the late-'80s and '90s. Among the works the Maryland festival included was "Mexican Standoff (Falling Into You)," in which Plympton animates a video for the Dutch band Parson Brown (for the uninitiated: He's also drawn for such artists as Kanye West and Weird Al Yankovic).

The festival also include Plympton's "Santa: The Fascist Years," as well as "Horn Dog," featuring Plympton's "plucky canine hero" from such films as the Oscar-nomiated "Guard Dog" and "Hot Dog" (here's a trailer for the latter):

The schedule also included Michael Ramsey's eerie "The Cave," an allegory of Plato's told in, well, virtual Play-Doh with a stirring candlelit creepiness::

The fest also offered "I Am So Proud of You" by the legendary Don Hertzfeldt, who has toured with Plympton. The video was a second chapter to his Sundance-winning short "Everything Will Be OK" (here's a trailer).

Meantime, if a handful of you have never seen Hertzfeldt's classic and influential "Rejected" -- an Oscar-nominated film featuring adverts that would-be commercial clients have (fictionally) spurned -- it's worth checking out here: