The YouTube Screening Room
I'm not generally a big YouTube fan. Sure, I've watched all the funny cat movies and seen people dump Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke. But little else has made me go there in some months. This has changed, though, with a new feature of the website: The YouTube Screen Room. Twice a month, four independent short films are added to the site, and the quality is amazing.
Here are my favorites so far. They're all really good though.
- I Met The Walrus. This is based on a tape recording by a 14-year-old who snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in 1969. He asks questions, and Lennon answers, and what he says is translated into some weird and interesting animation. I had some trouble understanding some of it, but it's worth watching a few times, anyway. The click at the end when he stops the recording also brought back some memories of times past. This video can be bought in the iTunes Store.
- The Danish Poet. A long-winded but surprisingly interesting story about how two people meet and fall in love. This is also animated, using a seemingly simple but very clever style. There are lots of interesting little ideas in it, and you also learn some interesting things about the relationship between Denmark and Norway.
- Love and War. This one takes the cake. This is a stop-motion opera. And not just a reenactment of some existing opera, this is an original opera for a bunny and a bear, with all the usual ingredients of a proper opera: singing in Italian, one-dimensional characters, an overdramatic story about love and death, air raids, and pigs that fry bacon. The production values on this one are incredible, and the main theme is very catchy. This film has won scores of awards, and also has its own website, where you can pay $3.99 to download it in almost any format and size imaginable (up to 1080p), plus the soundtrack, high-resolution stills, etc.
The films aren't all animated, but my favorites so far are. There are also interviews with filmmakers, and more stuff will soon be added.
Posted by Robert Kosara on July 14, 2008.