“Wind carries away destinies,” reads the brief synopsis for a short film titled “Jour de Vent,” or “Windy Day.” The sweeping animation was created in 2024 by a team of six graduates—Martin Chailloux, Ai Kim Crespin, Élise Golfouse, Chloé Lab, Hugo Taillez, Camille Truding—from École des Nouvelle Images school in Avignon, France.

A cast of characters—including a businessman, a picnicking family, a young couple, a cyclist, an old man and his dog, and a guitarist—spend a seemingly average day at the park. When a powerful gust of wind blows everyone’s day out of proportion, themes of change, acceptance, and connection emerge.

Much like the film’s surrender to the flow of life, the team embraced natural evolvement through the production process itself. “Interestingly enough, the story kept changing until the last day,” the graduates share in an interview with Animation Magazine. “The final shot was decided only three days before the end.”

“Jour de Vent” has won a multitude of awards, including Jury’s Choice Award at the 2025 SIGGRAPH Festival and Best International Short Film at Quickdraw Animation Society, among many more. Watch it now on Vimeo.

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From factories and barrel-roofed buildings to gabled churches and towers, Charles Young’s sprawling yet diminutive city of paper models continues to grow. Known for his miniature constructions and animations that often double as three-dimensional color studies, the sculptor and animator highlights a wide range of architectural styles with an emphasis on color pairings.

Since 2020, Young has been making hundreds of miniature structures inspired by A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Japanese costume designer and painter Sanzo Wada (1883-1967). (There’s even a fun, interactive website based on the book.) So far, Young has completed 258 buildings from the first volume, which focuses on two-color combinations, and there are 90 to go. But he’s created a wide array of examples featuring multiple color combinations, too.

In June, Young will display 120 three-color paper sculptures at Galerie Handwerk in Munich. And in addition to the paper models, he also creates architecturally inspired sculptures from wood and woven cane, some of which are currently on display in Scotland at Kirkcudbright Galleries and MacLaurin Gallery. See more on Young’s Instagram and Tumblr.

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A fashionable bat, a melancholy sun, and a springtime spirit with seasonal allergies are just a few of the characters conceived by Cat Johnston. Drawing on childhood memories, folk art, and nature, the Hastings-based illustrator and model maker creates expressive sculptures and puppets that inhabit dreamlike realms.

Invoking historical costumes and cartoonish and emotive faces, Johnston’s otherworldly cast seems both familiar and strange, as if children’s book protagonists have sprung to life or converged with a strange dream. Recent characters comprise a series of gods representing sunburn, hay fever, and insomnia, which also—rather inconveniently—are the sun, flowers, and the moon.

Johnston recently made her first short film in collaboration with animator Joseph Wallace called “The Wickywock and the Jubjub Berry.” As a mythical woodland creature deals with a bout of sleeplessness, a forest sprite appears with what seems like a practical solution, but things don’t exactly go as planned.

Coinciding with a local pagan festival called the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green, which occurs every first weekend of May, Johnston will have a small solo exhibition at a local pub called The Crown. In addition to signing on to work with London-based cinematic studio Passion Pictures as a director, the artist continues to explore the possibilities of film.

Johnston is currently working on a few ideas for animated series and hoping to develop a slightly longer format stop-motion project while also working on another short film, “which will be a mix of live action puppetry and stop-motion animation and will feature two flowery monsters and an extremely cute bee,” she says.

You might also enjoy the quirky Hieronymus Bosch-inspired figures of Roberto Benavidez.

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“I think of playgrounds as a primer of shapes and functions; simple, mysterious and evocative; thus educational,” Isamu Noguchi said in a pamphlet about his Playscapes. Perhaps best known for his stone sculptures and Akari lamps, the Japanese artist and designer always had an eye on the spaces that define childhood, particularly public playgrounds and their influence on the young mind.

In 1933, Noguchi proposed redeveloping an entire New York City block into “Play Mountain,” an enormous topographical project that would be unstructured and open-ended. Rather than have swings and swift metal slides, for example, Noguchi wanted earthen steps, a bandshell, and a large hill for sledding and gathering. The idea was that it could be just as fun in the winter as in the summer and stimulate kids’ imaginations more than the prescriptive equipment typical in urban parks. Then-Parks Commissioner Robert Moses rejected the plan, though, and despite efforts to have the project and others of Noguchi’s designs built in New York, none were ever realized in the city.

A series of short animations recreates this lesser-known history. Using hand-painted celluloid under a Rostrum camera, Eastend Western imagines what these never-built playgrounds would have looked like—and how children may have interacted with the unconventional structures. There are concrete mounds with cavernous openings, labyrinthine sand gardens, and asymmetrical equipment that could teach users that “the rate of swing is determined by the length of the pendulum,” the film says.

The animations were produced in conjunction with the exhibition Noguchi’s New York, which is on view through September 13 at The Noguchi Museum. There’s also a new monograph that dives into the artist’s playgrounds and is a companion to a major retrospective at the High Museum of Art, available for pre-order on Bookshop. Find the full film series on YouTube.

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Known for his trippy, seemingly infinite transformations, Jake Fried emphasizes the uncanniness of seeing. His newest work, “Strange Light,” is a mesmerizing one-minute animation conceived as a loop, drawn with ink and Wite-Out, then digitally enhanced with otherworldly, glowing hues.

An electric green pervades the scenes, dominated by eyes and motifs related to the act of viewing, augmented occasionally with pinks and other pastels. One gets a sense that we’re witnessing a strange trip or a time warp of some kind—or a person who has stayed up way too late—as psychedelic patterns and rhythms present a surreal self-portrait of the artist.

See more on Vimeo and Instagram.

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For the past year, Mary Maka has lived in Sri Lanka, where the tropical flora and fauna have inspired her to continue her vibrant Endless Forest series. In the artist’s characteristically smooth, cartoonish, vivid illustrations, creatures peer out from between giant leaves, cling to palm trees, and nap on long branches. She has also begun incorporating animated elements that enliven the scenes.

“At the same time, living on the island has revealed the fragility of nature’s balance,” Maka tells Colossal. “The lush tropical landscape conceals the vulnerability of the ecosystem and the delicate relationship between humans and the natural world.” Through these observations, both beauty and fragility have become key themes in her recent works.

Find more on Maka’s Behance and Instagram, and support her work on Patreon.

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Jason Mitcham’s childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina, is no longer standing. In 2011, the local government seized the house and the land he grew up on via eminent domain to widen what was then High Point Road into what’s now Gate City Boulevard. Mitcham last saw the site in 2023, when a paved highway blanketed where the neighborhood once stood, and fragments of garages and barns still marked the landscape.

To memorialize this beloved landmark, Mitcham hand-painted “Ever Behind the Sunset,” a touching stop-motion film that combines a series of expressive compositions with audio from the artist’s mother and his own home videos taken throughout the 1980s. Panels of thick, gestural brushstrokes animate a story of loss, grief, and remembrance as if viewed through a dreamlike haze.

Mitcham shares that the film reflects a series of compounding devastations, both personal and local: “the collapse of my father’s civil engineering and land-surveying firm after the 2008 housing crisis, my parents’ bankruptcy, his death, followed by my mother’s, and the community’s fight against the commercial development that would permanently alter their neighborhood.”

It’s worth watching the behind-the-scenes video that shares more of the artist’s process and thinking. Explore an archive of his films and works on canvas on his website and Instagram. You might also like the paintings of Jeremy Miranda.

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As a child, Artem “Alfred” Nakache (1915-1983) was afraid of water. The youngest of 11 children in a Jewish family that emigrated from Iraq to Constantine, Algeria, Alfred eventually overcame his terror of the depths and actually excelled at swimming. He became so skilled that by the mid-1930s, he had won both local and French national competitions—Algeria was under the control of France at the time—and moved to Paris to pursue his competitive career. He would, however, be impacted by an unthinkable tragedy, indelibly linked to what he would eventually accomplish.

A short film by director and artist Florence Miailhe titled “Papillon,” which is nominated for an Oscar this year, is based on Nakache’s extraordinary story and resilience in the face of unprecedented adversity during the Holocaust.

The star’s talent earned him numerous accolades and made him popular in France despite the Nazi occupation of Paris starting in 1940. By 1943, though, attitudes had shifted dramatically. He was ousted from a tournament as a result of being Jewish, and later that year, arrested by the Gestapo along with his wife and child. They were eventually transported to Auschwitz, separated, and never reunited.

Nakache eventually moved to Buchenwald, where he was released following liberation by American troops in 1945. Afterward, he returned to swimming and continued to win competitions, and in 1948, he even competed in the Olympics in London.

Miailhe met Nakache in person as a child, she tells Animation Magazine. “At the time, I was taking swimming lessons with his younger brother, William Nakache, and at every lesson, my father never failed to remind me: ‘You know, William, he’s the little brother of Alfred Nakache, the great swimming champion!'” One day, Alfred Nakache attended the lesson, and Miailhe got to demonstrate her butterfly stroke. But it wasn’t until years later, when her curiosity led her to research Nakache’s story, that she learned about what she presumed she had been too young to be told when she first met him.

Referencing a historical story, Miailhe’s poignant rendering of Nakache’s memories and experiences is nevertheless prescient as the 2026 Winter Olympics have just kicked off. And just this past weekend, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX Halftime Show quickly became fodder for partisan political discourse in the U.S.—the Puerto Rican pop star has been highly critical of ICE—highlighting the current administration’s nationalist, and even white supremacist, inclinations.

“Papillon” was created using an animated painting technique, similar to Miailhe’s 2021 feature-length film Le Traversée, or The Crossing. Brushstrokes create both texture and depth as gestural swatches of blues and greens with white splotches indicate deep water with splashes or bubbles.

Nakache died shortly after swimming in a port just a few miles from where Miailhe used to swim when she was young. In addition to the personal connection, she continues in the interview with Animation Magazine: “It all seemed obvious to me: telling this story brought together many themes that are dear to me—resilience, transmission, memory, but also political issues, such as the fate of a Jewish swimmer facing adversity.”

See the film in its entirety on YouTube.

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For three months, Julia Fernandez would spend the hours between 8 a.m. and noon waiting for the right light to filter into her Brooklyn studio. Once the shared space was properly lit, she would swap out a grid of 12 ceramic tiles and take overhead photos that would eventually be pieced together into the charming stop-motion animation, “Dirt.”

The music video for an acoustic song by Los Angeles-based Emory, Fernandez’s film cycles through 300 tiles that reveal a small rabbit hopping across the frame, children running, and a spindly, line-drawn flower blooming and wilting. Each carved character is set within the grainy patchwork, which highlights the medium’s particularities through irregular edges and differences in the glazes. Combined with the physical manipulations required of stop-motion, the ceramic animation is a poetic ode to an unlikely pairing of tactile media.

In a conversation with It’s Nice That, Fernandez shares that she first melded the two after etching a small cup that doubled as a zoetrope. Also featuring a rabbit and a flower, this playful compilation is a clear precursor to the techniques and characters that shine in “Dirt.” “Seeing a material that’s supposed to be still and permanent begin to move felt like magic, like I had cracked some code in reality to create movement that should otherwise be impossible,” she said.

Watch more of the artist’s ceramic animations on Instagram.

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For Kiana Calloway, the brick wall became a green screen for theatrical performances and football games. For Sunny Jacobs, meditation brought her to a lush patch of grass and her children’s rooms at bedtime. And for Frank De Palma, 22 years without a mirror meant he didn’t recognize the man who finally emerged from the 6 x 9 foot cell.

All three narrate the devastating “Inside, The Valley Sings,” directed by Nathan Fagan with animation by Natasza Cetner. The rotoscoped short film recounts the experiences of the trio, who were collectively isolated in solitary confinement for 36 years. Each shares how they coped with the inhumane conditions that barred any connection with another person. Dissociation and psychological torment reigned, providing relief and torment within such a cruel environment.

Solitary confinement is the practice of detaining a person in a cell for nearly or all of 24 hours. This type of segregation cuts off contact with others and sometimes lasts for days, weeks, or, as we see in the film, decades. The U.S. imprisons more of its population than nearly every other country and is the only Western nation to allow the practice, which the U.N. recognizes as torture and has sought to outlaw. A 2023 report estimated that 122,000 children and adults are held in solitary confinement in U.S. facilities each day.

The traumatic effects of segregation can also last well beyond prison. “Even today, I wake up with cold sweats, having nightmares of screams, howling from the cells next to me. Or hearing a guy that’s mentally ill four cells down from me that’s beating and screaming and hollering for a security officer to come down there and give him some type of medical treatment, only to get beaten,” Calloway says.

What “Inside, The Valley Sings” does particularly well is mimic the conditions of the cell. We witness tightly cropped frames and claustrophobic aerial views. And because each person is presented in grayscale, they become part of the carceral architecture, with only their orange uniforms—signifiers of their inmate status—and fantasies in bright color.

“My hope is that audiences will understand what survivors have been telling us for years: that solitary confinement is a form of torture, pure and simple,” Fagan writes in a statement about the film. “And any justice system that claims to be grounded in the dignity and rights of the individual must recognise this.” It’s worth reading the stories of all three narrators on the film’s website, which also offers more information about the campaign to end solitary confinement.

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