So It Goes

This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols. The two foot high monkey had bolted, moveable joints and some 50 interchangeable mouths to convey the singing. To get the movements right, Lye filmed his new wife, Jane, a prize-winning rumba dancer.

A marching band of Germans, Italians, and Japanese march through the streets of swastika-motif Nutziland, serenading "Der Fuehrer's Face." Donald Duck, not living in the region by choice, struggles to make do with disgusting Nazi food rations and then with his day of toil at a Nazi artillery factory. After a nervous breakdown, Donald awakens to find that his experience was in fact a nightmare.

Misha observes the area with binoculars. In the infinite white, he notices Gia, as lonely as himself.

Short film to a song of love lost and rediscovered, a woman sees and undergoes surreal transformations. Her lover's face melts off, she dons a dress from the shadow of a bell and becomes a dandelion, ants crawl out of a hand and become Frenchmen riding bicycles. Not to mention the turtles with faces on their backs that collide to form a ballerina, or the bizarre baseball game.

Elmer Fudd introduces two pieces of classical music: "Tales of the Vienna Woods" and "The Blue Danube", and acted out by Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Laramore the Hound Dog, a family of swans, and a juvenile Daffy Duck.

The two pigs building houses of hay and sticks scoff at their brother, building the brick house. But when the wolf comes around and blows their houses down (after trickery like dressing as a foundling sheep fails), they run to their brother's house. And throughout, they sing the classic song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?".

Originally produced for television, this short film is an off-the-wall road movie starring the Beatles and a couple dozen friends on a psychedelic bus tour.

Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen - through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things - that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers - that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."

In this short film by Norman McLaren, dancers enact the Greek tragedy of Narcissus, the beautiful youth whose excessive self-love condemned him to a trapped existence. Skilfully merging film, dance and music, the film is a compendium of the techniques McLaren acquired over a lifetime of experimentation.

Step back into the imaginative and frankly terrifying world of Becky & Joe with Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. In this episode: Some things change over Time.