This piece received a wide web airing when it debuted on Vimeo in 2008. I've included it as a sample of the kind of animation that can be made without expensive overheads (studio, lights, distribution deals, etc.)
The artist Blu comes from Bologna, Italy, has been making wall art publicly since 2001, has made wall art in many countries, and works with house paint and roller brushes.
In other pieces on his site, the artist incorporates industrial objects, sand, and clay into the animated narrative.
Animation is a medium often chosen by artists with wide-ranging interests, as exemplified by the Russian-born Ladislaw Starewich. His fascination for entomology led him to experiment with the stop-motion technique, as recounted in this anecdote:
"In the mating season, beetles fight. Their jaws remind one of deer's horns. I wished to film them but since their fighting is nocturnal, the light I used would freeze them into total immobility. By using embalmed beetles, I reconstructed the different phases of that fight, frame by frame, with progressive changes, more than five hundred frames for thirty seconds of projection. The result surpassed my hopes: 1910 -Lucanus Cervus - the first three-dimensional animated film" (Starewich, L., in Bendazzi,G.,"Cartoons", 1995)
The result surpassed audiences' expectations also, and their response so encouraged Starewich he went on to spend a lifetime making stop-motion films. In his early work he continued to use insect bodies as puppets, lending a macabre aura to the films. A move to France brought more conventional puppet-making techniques into his repertoire, and the films appear more lyrical as a result.
References
Bendazzi,G.,"Cartoons, One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation", John Libbey and Co, 1995)
"allegory (n.) - the representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form."
While many animated films can be read at an allegorical level to some extent, "Balance" conveys it's "abstract ideas" with particular clarity. By removing traditional film-making artifices (character, setting, dialogue etc.), we are shown a portrait of the delicate balance between greed and fear that characterises human economic activity.
The film was made by the Lauenstein twins whilst enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. It won them the Academy Award for Short Animation in 1989
