I’ve been a fan of This Is It Collective’s work since I saw their first video, Bad Things That Could Happen. This Is It is a collective of illustrators, animators, artists and designers based in London and they produce colourful, well-designed animations and videos. This one in particular made me snigger with joy.

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From outside of Wellington comes a very young bedroom producer who makes his own magical brand of sexy Italo disco while also creating his own album art and animating his own music videos. He will often sing female-style backup vocals in falsetto and shred hair metal guitar solos over his beats. The majority of New Zealanders were still unaware when he took off to Paris while still a teenager and began making waves in Europe.

Animator Lara Lee is interviewing different children about their favorite animal for this adorable animation series, My Favorite Animal.

Word Salad is a mixture of hand-drawn animation and mysterious, ominous music by Micah Buzan. I don’t know what else to say, except that it’s an astonishingly beautiful piece of artwork.

Animated plastic toys. Peppered with brilliant slapstick. A storyline that makes the most wondrous stupid sense. Too excited to form proper sentences. Amazing animated film from Belgium. Hilarity that just builds and builds until your head explodes.

Deep breath. Okay, this film is weird, but it’s amazing weird. The animation techniques are as original and innovative as the narrative, which just leaves you staring at the screen going, ‘I have no idea how they came up with that, but I’m so glad they did’.

For me, this film ended with a very awkward television hug, and a sloppy kiss. It’s that good. So join Indian, Cowboy and Horse as they try to get their walls back from the sea people. You’ll regret it forever if you don’t.

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Set to the sweet animation of Johnny Kelly, this cover version of Coldplay’s The Scientist by Willie Nelson is achingly beautiful. The short film, itself, ‘depicts the life of a farmer as he slowly turns his family farm into an industrial animal factory before seeing the errors of his ways and opting for a more sustainable future’.

They should resurrect Liquid Television or make another Heavy Metal movie to showcase the animation and artwork of illustrator Matthew Wade, whose work definitely relates to what I do i.e. skeletons, monsters, and grossness.

This short animation by Kaleb Durocher and Michelle Chrzanowski expresses a sense of loneliness and isolation that I can relate to sometimes. I’ll be in my room reading Sylvia Plath and listening to Nine Inch Nails and realize no one understands me.

Mr O’Reilly is a unique breed amongst animation directors, having both style and substance. I’d call him an auteur, but he’d call me a nasty name or send me a virus. This short film left me more satisfied after 14 minutes than many feature films can do in 90. And heck, you can buy his film in HD for 4 Euros.

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Remember the thrill you used to get watching the Count go thrugh his familiar routine every week on Sesame Street? The adrenalin rush that would build as he got closer and closer to the end? Well, this stop-motion remake of the classic Pinball Number 12 animation from Sesame Street will get the blood pumping again. Guaranteed.

I’ve admired the work of Clyde Peterson: be it as a musician, filmmaker, animator, or writer of brilliant comics, for many years now. Here’s one recent, awesome as always example. Perhaps it will make an admirer out of you, too.

I’m happy to be involved with this audio/visual experimental, improvised performance troop consisting of four artists, three freestyling MCs, and a live four piece band. Inspired by Pictionary, Mr. Squiggle and animation, Sketch the Rhyme incorporates live drawing projected for the audience to see, rappers freestyling, and it’s all being inspired by the sketching.

Everything is ad-lib and spontaneous. You see and hear it all being performed right before your eyes. It’s all a little bit ‘game show’ like, as the whole production is structured into ‘games’ and each ‘game’ has a different tune performed by live house band, The Phonies.

French animator Chloe Mazlo just finished the art direction for Albert, a fun and addictive iPad and iPhone game produced by Fingerlab. The result is a smooth, pleasant mix of low-cost design and advanced technology.

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I just got to check out Canadian filmmaker/animator Jeff Chiba Stearn’s debut documentary, One Big Hapa Family, about intermarriage between Japanese-Canadians and white Canadians.

It’s a personal if cursory exploration of identity in an ever-shifting, globalized world that takes viewers from the internment of Japanese Canadians during WWII to the present-day mish-mash of multiculturalism. Stearns keeps it light and welcoming with loads of endearing animated sequences.

Orion Rigel Dommisse is perhaps best known for her music. But her animation is insane, in the best possible way. Here is Nervous Cat, one of my favorites of hers.

This is the perfect cartoon. It’s like a person with a well-developed personality. It’s gentle, and has a wide-eyed enthusiasm for pure imagination, but the characters use contemporary, up-to-the-minute slang and usually deal with insane situations in realistic ways. It is one of the most weird, creative, and satisfyingly entertaining shows I’ve seen in a long time. Also, the animation reminds me of late 80s computer games or something made on MS Paint.

Have you ever wished you could go back the last few minutes of your life? To say something different, to do something you should have done? Travis found a way.

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These Bendito shadow videos are brilliant! Created by Jossie Malis and with music by Sxip Shirey, this episode is the third in the ongoing Bendito Machine series. Watch the first two videos below.

Breeder, a motion graphics and animation studio in Brisbane, have created a short animation called Rising, which they hope will act as a powerful reminder for people to donate to the Red Cross Japan disaster appeal.

In this awesome short animated film by Malcolm Sutherland an ‘explorer adventures into an unknown world, yet it seems that he has been there before’. Aw.