George Griffin

A documentary about the early days of animation.

A documentary about the early days of animation.

Essay on animation's contradictory legacy: comedy and formalism.

Edible animation. Silhouettes of black beans creating mandala patterns with frenzied percussion on track.

Using a 1945 Charlie Parker song, American indie animator, George Griffin greets us with a dizzying dance of torn Pop Art images. Shreds of consumer culture flash before us, swayed and absorbed by the tempo and power of Parker's horn.

Animator George Griffin recalls racial discord in his eastern Tennessee hometown. A collage of photographs, maps, interviews, cartoons, and jazz highlights the horrors of a hatred that reverberates to this day.

Fantastical, larger-than-life puppetry and rambunctiously playful choreography is framed against an Edenic backdrop of Vermont farm country in George Griffin and DeeDee Halleck’s luminous, lyrical short film, which documents the 1974 edition of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus, taking place soon after the company’s relocation from downtown Manhattan to the rural New England enclave where it remains headquartered to this day.

USA, 1981, colour, sound, 7 min.

All the members of an old men's club are large phalluses.

A duplicated documentary of a NYC sidewalk

Abstract exercise in pattern recognition.

A hand draws a flipbook of liquid architecture.

Essay on animation's contradictory legacy: comedy and formalism.

Essay on animation's contradictory legacy: comedy and formalism.

Twenty animators from the U.S., Switzerland, Poland and China express their friendship with and love of animation in a series of animated variations on the standard countdown.

Tri-colored cycle of a dance movement set to a prelude from Bach's well-tempered clavier.

A critique of marketing speak in the commercial cartoon industry.

Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge's series of photographs entitled "Running Man", Griffin creates a whimsical animated poem, using a variety of graphic styles.

Like many of my films THUMBNAIL SKETCHES began as a flipbook. However this particular book didn't really flip. Each page instead of being one phase in a series (like a frame of film), contained a complete cycle of 8 drawings arranged in a rectangular ring. The reader had to construct the information conceptually not just optically as if it were a mosaic of abstract comic strip panels. The film begins with a 'live' prologue documenting the book's original form; then follows its destruction by scissors, a brief autopsy illustrating the mechanics of movement, and its eventual animated rebirth.

A woman behind a translucent, dripping shower curtain; a flipbook of memories of a romance from decades ago. Bach's music to round things out.

An ingenious, witty essay on making filmed, photographed, drawn, painted, and Xeroxed images move. Reverberating between multi-media versions of the same events, playing with disjunctions between figure and ground, HEAD is a 'trickfilm' meditation on portraiture; the animator, as actor, lives through his drawings, which in turn become actors who influence his own self-image. An insider's diary on the process of creation, HEAD is a brilliant encyclopedic exploration of the circular relationship between the animator and his creation, of the nature of animated illusion itself.

The man just wants a piece of candy. The candy machine just wants a piece of the man. A cartoon employing a novel xerox technique to combine animation and live action.

An animated futuristic autobiography of a man born in the year 2000.

Animated flipbook of endlessly evolving entrancement.

For any harried parent who has ever been faced with having to put a recalcitrant child to bed, this very sweet and funny tale of nighttime shenanigans will resonate with rueful truth. From songs and stories, to toilet rituals, to creepy things under the bed, A LITTLE ROUTINE perfectly captures the many nuances of the parent-child war zone that is bedtime.