Movies: Calarts

At a summer sleepover, two best friends realize they may be connected by more than just friendship....

The film, Al Tudi Tuhak, is a creation story inspired by the art and mythology of the Northwest coast people. The story involves the creator, or "The Great Father" as he whittles the world into existence. Each of his wood shavings became fish, trees,...

The proprietress of a burger joint is retiring and her children must compete to see who is worthy of taking her place....

Me Broni Ba is a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana. The tangled legacy of European colonialism in Africa is evoked through images of women practicing hair braiding on discarded white baby dolls from the West. The film unfolds through a...

A Cal Arts stop motion short in praise of good oral hygiene....

Emma, a lonely old woman, reminisces of one of her childhood birthday parties....

"Fame" was used as the soundtrack of an animated music video of the same title, directed by Richard Jefferies and Mark Kirkland while students at California Institute of the Arts. The film, released in 1975, went on to win the Student Academy Award f...

This short is about a purple dinosaur named Sigmund, who likes to bounce on top of trees. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2011....

Sarah and her two cats go about their separate lives. The cats have strange dreams about their desires, and Sarah develops an unshakable paranoia that something is wrong with them. Sarah's paranoia bleeds into her social life, and her two cats have t...

What are one week films? They're an assignment we do our first week back at CalArts, designed to dust off cobwebs by throwing us straight into the deep end. Our class theme was "square," and we had a lot of fun playing around with compositions inspir...

Charlie Brown is on the run from the Peanuts Gang after the Great Pumpkin puts a bounty on his head in this wild animated student short by Jim Reardon....

This animated short is a visual representation of Goethe's poem, The ErlKing that uses sand-on-glass animation set to the music of Franz Schubert. The moving images, resembling woodcuts, capture the haunting, nightmarish quality of the tale of the Er...

A polar bear is hunted by Eskimos. But suddenly the hunt gets interrupted. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive....

A child terminally becomes bad animation and is sent to an asylum of abandoned and lost cartoon characters....

Slik Willy combines abstract animation, sound and spoken narration to tell a narrative story. The film uses hand-drawn animation and textures from 35mm transparencies. Final compositing was done using an optical printer....

A Birth of BrainFly is a surreal narrative dealing with the process of a person’s individuation in a mental scape. A journey through and into Self, the constructed labyrinths of Ego, and the creative transcendence of the mind's physical limitations. ...

Surreal animation representing society's various rituals and practices....

A sickly elephant father struggles to open a jar of aspirin....

A teacher struggles to control a rumor spreading around his elementary school by one greedy child....

After receiving a VHS tape claiming she's a disciple of an alien species known as the "True Mothers," Amy joins a local UFO cult, donning the name Celisse and befriending a number of other members while under the watch of the cult's peculiar founder,...