Showbits

I spend so much time watching YouTube that, in 2009, I applied that knowledge toward creating a Showbits feature: Summer Shorts. Every weekday for a week, I posted a different short film to this site. In 2010, I revisited the format but over a longer period of time, sharing one video every Friday for 17 weeks.

After a two-year hiatus, I'm pleased to announce Summer Shorts is back, though in a new context. Going with a thematic approach and a commercial outlet, I've compiled my nine favorite CGI shorts into a video gallery. "9 animated shorts that give Pixar a run for its money" is my first freelance feature for ITworld, an affiliate of Computerworld, the magazine where I was an editor for six years.

Who needs Pixar? Here are my 9 favorite CGI shorts that you can watch for free right on YouTube.

Two of the nine shorts will be familiar to long-time Showbits readers. Pigeon: Impossible and Kiwi, though older, stand as some of the most enjoyable and memorable animated films I have seen online. Five other shorts I'd seen before but had not previously shared, leaving Rosa and The Chase as new to me, the result of extensive research into YouTube's library.

There were enough other candidates that ITworld's gallery could have been nearly double its length: six more videos, including The Passenger and Sebastian's Voodoo, nearly made the cut. As is, the final playlist totals an hour, making for an fun and diverse showcase of the fastest, funniest, most poignant CGI films YouTube has to offer.

There are many ways for a film to be creative: plot, characters, presentation, and more. One variation we don't often see is in the medium itself. So far this year, the post popular media for the Summer Shorts films are CGI and live action. We don't often see puppets or classic animation, for example.

Paintballing is a short that could be classic animation but looks more like it was drawn in Microsoft Paint. That crude program is rarely a source of works of art, but this short is both novel and fun:

Choosing an art form that is thematically related to the plot was an inspired choice that is rarely possible with more traditional media. On the other hand, I've been playing too much Worms lately, so maybe I'm biased toward depictions of cute little things blowing each other up.