You could watch great animated shorts on YouTube for the rest of your life
The benefit of YouTube’s “You watched this one video, so you must want to see everything else we have along those lines” algorithm is that it helpfully brings up things you didn’t even know to look for, based on interests you have already demonstrated. The downside is how quickly that algorithm can become monotonous: just because you’re watching a single episode by “Google Translate sings‘ doesn’t necessarily mean you want your YouTube homepage to suddenly send you a thousand extra episodes of the same channel.
But if you ever want the YouTube equivalent of a timeline cleanup and/or rabbit hole you can collapse into pretty much forever, it’s easy to get there with one simple trick. Watch a few standalone animated shorts on the service and YouTube will instantly fill your page with an infinite variety of visually creative, experimental, and above all, ambitious short stories.
There aren’t many outlets for short films these days, aside from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and so on: celebrated short animation tournaments are over. (Almost?) Outside of film festival shows or museum events, there aren’t really any good places for animators to sell their short films for a profit. That’s why many of them post their work on YouTube, where it can be viewed and distributed, where word of mouth is collected and can serve as a calling card for young talent looking to make the transition to feature films. All of this means that there is one lot of short animation on the site – a non-stop, self-curated short festival of people who not only want to tell visually oriented, daring stories, but sometimes also want to change how those stories are told.
Part of this animation comes from students: the famous French animation school Gobelins puts her students’ projects onlineand the library alone is a treat. (See also the CalArts Channelthe Sheridan College Canalthe Rubika Channeletc.) Some videos come from small studios or independent creators around the world, looking for attention and recognition. Many of these short films have participated in festival competitions. Some are slick, professional work that mimics the production and storytelling styles of Pixar or DreamWorks. Many, many more are experimental and play with design, style, atmosphere and expression. From the thumbnail of a video you can often quickly see which style the creators have chosen.
If you want to start somewhere simple and satisfying, I’ve been a long-time fan of Jacob Frey’s 2014 mega-prize winner The presenta simple, heartwarming story about a teenage gamer and the new puppy that disgusts him:
Do you want the exact opposite of that? Watch the stylized, fluidly beautiful action in this dark Indian fable about climate refugees in a flooded city versus a killer tiger:
From there… Want something longer, more elaborate and more ambitious?
Something experimental and wacky?
A haunting, melancholic mood piece?
Weird, beautiful stop motion?
Old-fashioned paper cutouts?
Fan films in familiar environments?
A charming friendship story that feels like a classic children’s picture book?
Maybe just a cute kitten from hell?
Whatever you’re into, it’s pretty easy to dive into YouTube’s vast collection of animated short stories and get lost. Don’t forget to bookmark your favorites. I’m still trying to track down a fun story I saw years ago about the unfortunate courtship habits of strange aliens who looked a bit like electric lemurs and lived in an elaborate, beautifully lit city. I lost it among all the other shorts in my timeline. If you come across it during your own rabbit hole dive through the endless supply of fun animated shorts on YouTube, let me know, would you?