Hello everyone,
I’ve been trying to find this out for a very long time but have come up with nothing really. It’s going to be a hard one for me to explain and describe because it was something that I saw only a few times as a kid. And the other thing is, I don’t know if it was a movie, tv show, short film etc etc….
But basically, I think it was from the mid-late 80’s or even in the very early 90’s that it would have been released. It was a “series” of short animated movie/films I believe. They were very surreal, strange and out there which is why they are still in the back of my mind. I can only partially remember two of them so i’ll describe them shortly. It would have been on TV and then I think that my Mum recorded it on a VHS so that we could watch it again. From what I can remember, the main style of animation was Stop-motion and it was done in clay for the two shorts that I remember. It may have not been wholly in clay as I remember though, it could have been mixed media, but i’m 99% sure it was stop-motion as it was one of the first that I saw and it stuck in my mind. Anyway:
Short Movie One:
The first one that I partially remember is based in an artists workshop. Or at least a creative person’s workshop/den. The whole workshop was coloured white and grey, but mostly white. I am sure that there were sinks, tables, chairs, shelves and stuff strewn around the room. I think (not 100% sure on this one) that there was just either a giant floating head/shoulders of a man in the centre with a pair of hands as well. Or it was just the hands that were there, but there is something ringing in the back of my mind about a “bust” of a bald man. From what i can remember of the short, the “man” gets hold of colour paints, but possibly only Red and Blue (making it either English or American?) and then just starts painting all over the room. The hands were crashing into things, painting all over the place, the bust was getting paint all over himself as well I believe. Now I don’t know if this is correct (so take this with a pinch of salt) but I have something telling me that he got the red paint by drilling into his head and taking it from his brain?! That’s one of the weird parts of the movie anyway.
Short Movie Two:
This one I have less information/memory of unfortunately, so a lot of it may be incorrect. It was based in the future, almost like a dystopian future with an “apocalypse” style feeling to it. It was focused around a man and a kid that he was looking after/caring for. I don’t think it was his kid, i think he found him and was protecting him. I think that there were either Aliens, robots or something that had essentially taken over the world and most of the humans were in hiding. (a lot of this is me just spit-balling and stringing things together from a very patchy memory). The main scene i remember is the “last” scene… They were in this junk yard kind of thing, lots of stacked up boxes, metal and rubbish etc. I think they’d been tracked down by the bad guys. The man and kid are either crawling through a sewage pipe or he puts the kid in a sewage pipe or something?? And then he gets shot, or shoots himself, but basically dies. I might be making this next part up, but i believe it may have turned out that he was actually a robot/alien/whatever? Because after he got shot, he bled a different colour blood or you saw his robot insides etc etc? I really can’t remember. The main part i do is the man and kid, in a junkyard, crawling through a sewage pipe and the guy dying while the kid escapes….i think….
I doubt anyone else out there knows what i am talking about and will ever find out what this is/was, but i thought that it would be worth a shot to ask you guys/girls. Fingers crossed someone at least has a vague memory of what I don’t think was a dream i dreamt haha. Thank you for reading and taking the time out 🙂
I think it was before Nickelodeon but I am not 100% sure. I didn’t have nickelodeon (as far as i am aware) as I live in the UK and this is where i saw the short animations. I don’t think that they were actually aimed at kids, i would say young adults maybe? Because they were quite bizzare, weird and serious in nature. They weren’t fun, silly or childish. They may have been even directed to adults but I watched them due to my Mum recording them on VHS.
So I’ve been looking online and using IMDB as you suggested and I have found something that is giving me the same vibes/feelings as the type of animation it was. So it may not have been “Claymation” (but i’m pretty sure it was) but it could have been done with just models/figures/puppets etc. And I found a series of short animations by two people called “The Quay Brothers”. Their vibe of animation is exactly the same kind of weird/strange/bizzare that I can remember from “The Workshop Animation”. However I feel as though that “The Futuristic Animation” was a lot more story-lead and had an actual plot and story line.
I am working on figuring this out, but I am assuming this would have been before nickelodeon, so it wouldn’t be one of those, right? These seemed directed at kids? There are several series of shorts, imdb has them listed as tv series , but the minutes per ep are shown to be short….you might want to look at those too, for an image you may remember