Best Austrian animation movies

When Peter sets out on a magical journey to rescue his little sister Anne, he needs to travel to mysterious territory: the Moon! Anne was kidnapped by the evil Moon Man when she tried to help the beetle Mr. Zoomzeman in search for his wife. On his fantastic adventure, Peter lands on the Star Meadow where he meets the sleepy Mr. Sandman. He knows, only at the Night Fairy’s dinner in the castle in the clouds, they can find out where Anne is – but there aren’t enough seats for everyone. So they join the wild race along the Milky Way against the five Spirits of Nature: Storm Giant, Lightning Witch, Henry Hail, Rainy Robin and Mother Frost…

A device consisting of a clock, a pendulum, a faucet and a bucket enacts a series of events whenever the clock chimes.

Max, a city rabbit, reaches his goal of joining the master class for Easter rabbits but when the magical golden egg turns black, Max and his friends must act to save Easter being taken over by a family of foxes.

Puppets! Pixels! Anime! Live action! Stock footage! Lumpennerd Johannes Grenzfurthner gives an ideotaining cinematic revue about important political concepts. Everyone is talking about freedom! Privacy! Identity! Resistance! The Market! The Left! But, yikes, Johannes can't tolerate ignorant and topically abusive comments on the "Internet" anymore! Supported by writer Ishan Raval, in this film, Johannes explains, re-evaluates, and sometimes sacrifices political golden calves of discourse. Not to be used with false consciousness or silicone-based lubricant.

September 1989 in the GDR. With the change of the general mood in the country, the life of 12-year-old FRITZI changes as well. Her best friend Sophie has fled with her mother through Hungary to West Germany and the only thing Fritzi has left is Sophie's little dog Sputnik. But Fritzi misses Sophie just as much as her little four-legged friend does. Therefore, she decides to bring Sputnik to Sophie. But there is only one way to get there: over the strictly guarded border. A very dangerous adventure for a 12-year-old girl and a small dog...

Helvi's world is turned upside down when she discovers the existence of a technically advanced Elfkin gang that, in stark contrast to Elfie’s own clan, is second to none when it comes to fun and thrill-seeking. Can Helvi’s friendship with Bo, the youngest gang member, reconcile the two Elfkin clans after more than 250 years?

The story of a young man who goes on a treacherous journey to save his tribe from extinction as a never-ending drought has changed the world forever! It has become a deadly desert, sucking the life out of everything. With his hope set on a mysterious little box, can he overcome to save his tribe?

Various objects are having a sunny outing together in the nature.

Rainer Kohlberger is prepared to go far when it comes to the physical experiences he evokes with his work. Answering the Sun demands the utmost from its audience. The invitation is to squint our eyes and allow the most amazing trips to unfold – just like when we were children letting the sun come in. However, the work is simultaneously a 60-minute bombardment of coloured fields and a wall of sound, followed by a hallucinatory, silent inky-black sequence.

Anton and Franz live together since the beginnings of 20th century. They talk about their difficulties of being vampires, since their first bite in 1938. Their inconsistent arguments recall those of normal human beings. And history repeat itself. As if that were not enough, they also doesn`t really like each other much.

A series of hand-drawn short animations are photographed in the hand of the artist as she travels to various locations in Vienna.

Digital time thieves from our epoch and their ongoing daily routines. How do we (not) want to live in a future society?

A ride around Vienna’s Ringstrasse boulevard and then into the city, falling, eating, and finally ending up on the toilet. Death is always there, right in front of us.

A short film by Bärbel Neubauer.

STAMPFER DREAMS is a homage to the scientist Simon von Stampfer, who presented his invention of the Stroboscopic Discs in Vienna in 1833.

"It had to be me."

Arnulf Rainer—every which way but loose.

A hilarious bouncy rubber ball of heads. Don’t try this at home – even if you can.

An ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-player characters, the digital extras in video games. Their labor loops, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.

Part three of the trilogy, centred on the Swiss tenor August Schram, is now located in an opera house during a running performance of Donizetti's humorous melodrama "L'elisir d'amore" and furnished with a memorable cast of characters.

Rainer Kohlberger’s abstract film was created entirely without a camera. Through digital algorithms, he precisely arranged a rhythm of light and shadow that pulsates off the screen into our physical space with blinding intensity. The presence of light is almost felt as we are sucked into the image to become its ghostly accomplice. As we leave the theatre, the optical vibrations continue to haunt us.

How many ways can the human body be divided into two parts? Top and bottom, left and right, up and down… For every part of the body, artist Anna Vasof devises a surprising, witty gag of separation and reversal, executed with seamless digital effects. Then she extends the game to the body’s relationship with mobile phones, pandemic masks – anything with which we interact. As in all her work, Vasof makes the familiar deeply unfamiliar.

Two uniformed guards keep watch over a cave as animals carry on philosophical dialogues about important existential issues. Is it time to passionately devote yourself to reality? What about the perpetual reoccurrence of sameness? Meanwhile, the solution to one of the most essential problems is apparent: you just have to wash, peel, cut, and mash it. The apple. The serious practices of reality are calling.

Staging macho "bromances" between men like Vladimir Poutine and Xin Junping, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, using G-udit and $chwanger's superimposed faces as they rap in their melancholy style.

“Rats in the Walls” is a short animation that is inspired by one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most gripping horror tales. The film presents the story of a middle aged man who wakes up one night to horrific sounds coming from the walls of his own apartment. He believes the screeches to be the sound of rats but no one else will confirm his suspicion. In his search and difficulties in locating the source of these sounds, the protagonist is rattled by whether what is happening exists in his mind or in reality.

It's an ordinary day in the game GTA V – but the car-crowded streets are marked by a grave absence. Protagonist Edgar searches for clues, revealing the beautiful yet nightmarish nature of his reality.

Hedi is experiencing strange things. While her granddaughter is visiting, she suddenly embarks on a hiking journey, to the deepest parts of the Alps, revealing the reason for her devoted attachment to her hiking shoes.

Anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, searching for possibilities for peace in the most unlikely place of an online war game. It’s a tribute to disobedience and desertion — in both digital and physical-real warfare. Shot in the picturesque war landscapes of «Battlefield V», the hyperreal graphics become the backdrop for an essay-like narrative. The film revolves around the history of deserters — a part of human history, which has hardly been illuminated. Performances and creative interventions explore the scopes and limits of the audiovisual entertainment machine.

In an associative montage statues of saints in rigid and rapt poses are cross cut with those of real actors until the two can no longer be told apart. Gradually the real bodies break away from the constraints of their wooden models through increasingly improvised dance. A successful act of liberation from (Catholic) convention, which the material celebrates in an acstasy of multiple exposures and psychedelic colors.

Mr. Ham decides to have his heart removed to free himself from his complicated emotions. The doctor assures him that, in this day and age, this procedure no longer poses a problem.

Visuals for Edgar Varèse’s Arcana. Performed by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz under the direction of Argentine conductor and composer Dante Anzolini.

Zeichenfilm - Balzac oder das Auge Gottes is a play on the idea of trick film. And trick film it is. The 30-second work is shown twice in case the viewer missed something the first time: in crude hand-drawn animation Zeichenfilm ... evokes the scatological sado-masochistic actions and performances of Otto Muehl and Günter Brus which Kren filmed during his second period. In Zeichenfilm Balzac a male figure hangs himself, achieves a monstrous erection and ejaculates into a woman's mouth. She in turn hangs herself; he enters her vaginally then anally. Finally, she defecates on the left side of the frame wherein appears an eye of God while on the right in a cartoon box the words "Aber Otto" ("But Otto") materialize, a comic reference to Otto Muehl.

The film is uncommonly poetic and refined. The pictures come from a book by Federica Pagnucco and Linda Wolfsgruber, realized with printed characters in wood and lead. An old printing tecnique, well blended with wood-printed shapes, which gives a special aura of magic to the book, and subsequently to its animated version, thanks to the participation of Thomas Renoldner and the evocative soundtrack by Peter Rosmanith. It is a precious film owing to the rare suspension of the atmosphere and time, actually fixed and focusing on small things, habits, interstices, in the end, worlds...

At an exhibition, graphic designer Stefanie is thrilled by the work of John Heartfield, the inventor of political photomontage 100 years ago. While trying to understand his life on the run, she suddenly finds herself in Heartfield's studio.

The telephone wakes its uncounted brothers and sisters. The lady in the bathtub has two faces. Shall I help a beautiful man when forks and teeth fight in the skies?

This film describes a feeling of longing, longing for sun, longing for salt, and longing for the sea.

Three continuous zooms towards a landscape are deconstructed into a discontinuous appearance of single frames. The panoramic view is obstructed, the organic movement of the hand dissolved into structural variation of the basic units of film. Indexical content is inevitably present on the physical film strip and yet lost in the structure of the film. The closer you get to what is out there, the more it disappears.

It’s all the rage to evoke spectacular ‘immersive’ cinema today, but nothing matches the immersion effect of a Siegfried A. Fruhauf film. Agglomerating the textures of cave surfaces with the material traces of filmic processes, Cave Painting offers a trippy visual and sonic journey for the senses that evokes an avant-garde, grunge version of the psychedelia in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oydssey. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss something good. As always, Fruhauf conjures a new world.

Egon arrives. Rather, Egon arrives late. If he had arrived on time, the situation which had made his arrival unwelcome, would not have occured. He would have been welcomed and this farce would not have been able to take place...

Flickering and pulsating, spitting and swallowing at the same time. The screen becomes a vibrating membrane; colours, shapes, beats and sounds a psychedelic whirlpool. A short, fast-paced audiovisual ode to the hypnotic power of colour and vertigo.