Pretensions attended computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH Asia last week. The conference also staged the first Computer Animation Festival  and P managed to attend one short screening at the Animation Theatre. Here are her most memorable picks from the hour-plus session.

Monsieur Cok by Franck Dion of Papy3D Productions is an extremely dystopian view of the industrial revolution. It won the best animation award at the Bolzano Film Festival and has a very striking “steampunk” type look – very gritty. It manages to be quintessentially french in an Edith Piaf kind of way – maybe its the music. Watch the trailer and see what you think!

The Evil Twin by Taiwanese artist Yun Wang is a pretty disturbing story on many levels. It takes many elements from modern Asian ghost stories, including the blood and implements it with characters that already look very much like voodoo dolls.

The full animation can be watched at the MetaCafe site here. For some reason when P tries to embed it, she gets something else entirely, so please click through to the Metacafe site above.

Confine(s) by Makoto Yabuki is true surrealistic art with abstract cones, pyramids and circles morphing into parts of the human body, humanesque shapes swirling like schools of fish and psychedelic rainbow art to the strains of a music video. View the Vimeo video below.

Fabio Berton’s MTV Our Noise animation featured four extremely cute mechanical birds bopping away to the music. P couldn’t find the exact same animation on the net, but here’s a link to a similar one on Youtube.

Tarboy by Australian James Lee was another bleak short film about workers being abused. In this case, the workers were robot slaves who were rudely junked in the tar when more efficient models were developed. From their angst, Tarboy is born to strike a blow against evil bosses everywhere.

The Turtle and the Shark was developed by Ryan Woodward of Brigham Young University and does a wonderful take on (presumably?) polynesian art. The animation takes a native batik print and animates the characters within it to tell the story. A trailer can be viewed here.

Finally, P would like to leave you with this hilarious short advert for Greenpeace by Johannes Kuemmel. Enjoy!