Beltesassar Shares 10 Gigs of Animated Shorts in New Online Festival

By Ezra Winton, May 21, 2007 Comments (3)

Earlier this year, a professor in the Netherlands used an Azuerus torrent press to share nearly 150 short animated films - 10 Gigs and counting - with the world. Beltesassar's Short Animation Festival (named after the prof himself) is an incredible collection of short animations from all over the globe dating back to 1911.

In the nine part series which can be downloaded from several torrent sites, there are shorts from Russia, France, Japan, Canada, the USA, the UK and more.

The collection contains mainstream staples such as the BBC's "Bob's Birthday" but also rare gems such as "Killing and Egg" and the splendidly bizarre "Rejected" by Don Hertzfeldt.

While this isn't a political collection per se, there are political pieces peppered throughout, and the very nature of putting this together and making it available through file sharing is political in itself.

From professor Beltesassar's syllabus accompanying part VIII of the festival:

Part VIII: This last .5 GB of animations consists of a nice overview of short animated films. I included more mainstream animations like A Greek Tragedy, Self Service, When The Day Breaks, and Bill Plymbton’s Push comes to Shove. There are 3 longer animations, Daniel Greaves’ Flatworld, The Cunning Little Vixen (a nice BBC production) and Zbrodnia i Kara (Crime and Punishment) by Dumala. There are more eastern European animators in this torrent, the unknown Gary Seko and Michaela Pavlatova. From Japan comes the godftather of manga, Osamu Tezuka with his nice short Jumping. Alltogether I hope you will like the collection, and I hope I could interest some more people in short animated films.

To download this indispensable collection of short animation, visit sites like TorrentSpy or IsoHunt and search for "Beltesassar." An incredibly eclectic collection is right around the corner for your downloading pleasure..