René Chénier

Filmmaker and comic strip artist Claude Cloutier has made a striking satire on big oil, a musical where cars sing and dance while the planet falls into despair.

This micro-epic short film is an inspired tribute to visionary avant-garde composer Walter Boudreau: his life, work, mischief, and boundless artistic curiosity. Both a documentary biopic and a wildly abstract hallucination, the film conceives of Walter Boudreau as a radical explorer, struggling against the inert mass of the cosmos, charting bold new paths of artistic freedom and audaciously expanding the frontiers of our known musical universe.

This funny short animation was written and created by Tali (At Home with Mrs. Hen) and is inspired by the filmmaker's misadventures as a school bus driver in the Eastern Townships. Our protagonist dreams of becoming a bus driver in order to cruise down quiet country lanes and connect with nature, her young charges and their parents. But her idyllic view of her new job is sorely tested after she meets her surly boss, named Killer, and discovers that winding roads can prove treacherous in winter, especially with a faulty clutch. Through her cheeky humour and oblique look at the reality of people living in the Quebec countryside, Tali delivers a film that is unique, witty and touching. - Written by NFB

This short animation draws on advanced digital technologies to offer a new vision of dance in cinema. With motion capture (MoCap) and particle processing, designers Denis Poulin and Martine Époque create virtual dancers free of their morphological appearance. In this balletic and hypnotic film, dynamic traces carry the motion of the real dancers behind the on-screen movements. Addressing environmental themes by way of metaphor, CODA is a fused universe where space and time collide, deploy, and dissolve. In this technically and formally innovative film, luminous bodies in the infinite space of the cosmos transform and evolve to the rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

This short animation draws on advanced digital technologies to offer a new vision of dance in cinema. With motion capture (MoCap) and particle processing, designers Denis Poulin and Martine Époque create virtual dancers free of their morphological appearance. In this balletic and hypnotic film, dynamic traces carry the motion of the real dancers behind the on-screen movements. Addressing environmental themes by way of metaphor, CODA is a fused universe where space and time collide, deploy, and dissolve. In this technically and formally innovative film, luminous bodies in the infinite space of the cosmos transform and evolve to the rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Three books: a film festival catalogue, a dictionary, the Bible. Three works whose materiality has become obsolete by the digital dematerialization. A commentary on the fragility of culture.

This animated film is above all a love story told with emotion and delicacy. A man loves a woman; both of them love literature. We discover the murmur of their lives, the harmony of their feelings—and we learn how their affection for novels and poetry marks their existence beyond death. The fruitful alliance of filmmaker Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s imagery and the words of Quebec poet Hélène Dorion results in a subtle, sensitive film that resonates in the viewer’s heart and mind. In its hybridization of styles and techniques, The Day Is Listening is also a most modern and daring work: its director has deftly expanded the spectrum of traditional hand-drawn animation, incorporating mosaics of real images that express a myriad of intertwining memories as well as the pulse of urban life.

Theodore Ushev’s acclaimed 20th century trilogy concludes with this brilliant fusion of 3D and Russian constructivist-styled animation. Recycling elements of surrealism and cubism, this animated short by Theodore Ushev focuses on the relationship between art and war. Propelled by the exalting “invasion” theme from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony (No. 7), the film presents imagery of combat fronts and massacres, leading us from Dresden to Guernica, from the Spanish Civil War to Star Wars. It is at once a symphony that serves the war machine, that stirs the masses, and art that mourns the dead, voices its outrage and calls for peace.

Animated short about a dog's role in his family

In this evocative film about the eternal human search for home, Berta and Solomon arrive in a land that promises respite from their many journeys. But have they found utopia... or just another stop on their long journey?

This is the story about a boy not like the others that dreams about finding his place in the world.

Edmond is a misfit at the office. When his co-workers pull a prank giving him donkey ears, Edmond realizes his true nature: he, in fact, is a real donkey.

This tribute to Denis Marleau takes a simple and forthright approach to one of the major themes of his work: the relationship between material reality and consciousness, or more specifically, Freud’s concept of the Uncanny, which often emerges when dissonance between material reality and consciousness rises to the surface. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada in co-operation with the National Arts Centre and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Foundation on the occasion of the 2012 Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards.

Living alone in darkness, Kaspar has experienced little oflife until he’s discovered by a man in black and brought outinto the world. Animator Diane Obomsawin’s affecting fableis based on the tale of the nineteenth century’s most famous wild child.

Dancer in three dimensions and glowing from the inside.

While on an airplane, a traveller's spirit plunges into a dream world. Here, under the influence of the unknown, the logic of his desires prevails, and a romantic saga takes shape.

In this animated short, a young couple washed onto a strange, inhospitable shore, attempts to transform the land into an Eden. Through great effort they prosper, learning to conquer nature and their environment. But what will their victory mean? Alternately a vision of paradise and purgatory, with allusions to the Book of Genesis and prehistory, the film tells the story of human beings and their conquests, offering a dark, critical view of the rise and fall of civilizations.

In the vestibule of a hospital room, a young boy waits to see his dying mother. The clamor and spiralling movements of bodies around him intensify, forming a grotesque circus—a cacophonous circle that pushes the child back, depriving him of one final touch of his mother's hand. Using rotoscoped drawings suggestive of charcoal sketches, as well as 3D and object animation techniques, The Circus compels viewing with its unsettling realism. Colour is employed metaphorically to subtly express the promise and the memory of maternal affection. Nicolas Brault's highly personal film, suffused with poetic modesty, casts a poignantly sincere gaze on the heartbreak of a child facing the fearful, mysterious experience of his mother's death.

This animated short by Claude Cloutier is a pictorial account of an attack on Canadian soldiers during WWI. On the edge of the battlefield, recruits are dreading the order to attack. At the signal, a young soldier leaps into a hell of fire and blood where the earth engulfs both the living and the dead. Blending archival images and Cloutier’s hypnotizing brushstroke, the film is a dazzling illustration of the futility of war.

From the NFB: He is a young man; an optimist drawn to dark music and the themes of death and suffering. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has gained a reputation for his dedication, musicality and charisma. Combining documentary and animation, this short film captures his energy and passion, both in performance and in conversation.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcus…

The selfishness of the bourgeoisie and the dull passivity of its servants are the theme of this puppet animation presenting the tragicomedy of a society in its death throes, taking refuge in absurd behaviour.

How unbelievably boring is the life of a solitary cowboy living in the middle of a vast prairie, surrounded by stupid chickens clucking and a shapeless bovine! Not surprising then if his temper turns fowl. Based on a strip cartoon by the Swiss writer Ibn Al Rabin, Cot Cot is a hilarious parody of the western, featuring a cowboy at the end of his tether and a cow that's much smarter than she looks.