"L'Ortolan" - Lilli C a r r é

L'Ortolan from Lilli Carré on Vimeo.

So, Lilli Carre, the young cartoonist whose book The Lagoon is one of the more interesting books I've read in t he last few years, has been making these strange little short films and uploading them on her Vimeo page (all in addition to the great drawings and animated .gifs she has on her blog. She has about five shorts uploaded, and each one is well worth the time it takes to watch (I think What Hits the Moon is particularly good).

The re-emergence of this kind of animation is, I think, one of the great things about the youtube/vimeo world we live in right now. You used to get a ton of short animation as a part of going out to the movies, of course, but that hasn't been true for years and years before we were born, despite the botched attempts by theaters like the IFC center in NY to add short films to their programming. But lo and behold, put up an online video service and you start to get things like this - charming, low budget, and personal. Not to overstate the democracy of this sort of thing - Carre is an accomplished cartoonist with four published books to her name, in addition to all the short work she's done in publications like MOME - and I do not want this to sound like triumphalism for the web. But the existence of this sort of thing, readily accessible and for free, is the kind of thing that makes a bright and sunny morning feel just a little bit less wretched.

Also: Renee French has the best blog of any working cartoonist, by my estimation.