Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Bunnies are awesome




Welcome to the internet, where some people discover a thing one day, and then other people discover a thing three years later, and both of them feel like it's brand new.

That's my little disclaimer that the site I'm recommending today may not be "new." In fact, when I posted a link on Facebook, someone commented that she had stumbled across this site "a couple years ago," which may have been her mild way of telling me my discovery was yesterday's news. However, if you're like me and you haven't discovered it yet, it's new to you, and you're in for a little treat.

It's the website for a company called Angry Alien Productions (www.angryalien.com), and their thing is 30-second animated reenactments of popular movies, performed by bunnies. That's right, bunnies. In fact, they've got 68 of them posted on the site, and each one is as much of a joy to watch as the one before, even more so if it's a movie you love. I've excised thumbnails from eight of them above -- a prize for the first person in the comments section to identify all eight movies. And that prize is, you get to feel good about yourself for the rest of the day.

They truly are great, and they are plentiful as well. In fact, there are so many of these short films, that I discovered this late last week (thanks Kim for your original post on Facebook), and I've still only made it halfway through. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

And though that's really all I have to say, I did think it would be interesting to pause for a moment to recognize the significant role bunnies or rabbits (they're the same thing, right?) play in cinema. Sure, bunnies/rabbits (shall we call them babbits?) are inherently cute and fuzzy, with their little twitching noses and lazy little hops across the environment. (I don't mean they're lazy -- I just mean their actual hops have a cute little tentativeness that makes them seem a bit drunk or something). But when used in cinema, they are frequently sinister, aren't they? There's Frank the rabbit in Donnie Darko, the rabbit hallucinated by Ray Winstone's character in Sexy Beast, a macabre bunch of rabbits on a Lynchian sitcom in Inland Empire, and let's not forget the brutally realistic events in the lives of the rabbits in the various cinematic incarnations of Watership Down. Then, in a slightly more whimsical context, is the six-foot rabbit hallucinated by Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) in Harvey. I'm sure I'm only scratching the surface here.

Well, the Angry Alien Productions bunnies are of the cute and fun variety. Which is probably while they're called by the more playful term "bunnies" rather than the colder and more foreboding "rabbits."

Check them out. If you love movies -- and I think you do -- you owe it to yourself.

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