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Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci's sci-fi fable and Konstantin Bronzit's short exploration led awardees to the outer limits.

Your guide to the best Internet animation available via streaming and video-on-demand.

Vice's annual fiction issue hit newsstands this week. The theme of this year's issue is Hollywood and all of the stories have something to do with movies. The issue includes contributions from: David Mamet, Michel Gondry, Louis Mellis, Alec Sokolow, John Romano, Merrill Markoe, Kevin McEnroe, Emily McLaughlin and Benjamin Nugent. James Franco even wrote a story about Lindsey Lohan. Vice explained their approach to attracting so much talent on their site: "We shared an intuition that a lot of the most interesting writing being done today is being done for movies and TV. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that we watch a lot of movies. So we made a long list of our favorite movies and looked up the writers who worked on them, and we harassed them and their agents and their publicists for months. We started with a really long pitch letter, but we learned that in LA it's proper etiquette to write three-word-long emails. We tried to romance them by inviting them to dinner at the Chateau Marmont."    

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Brooklyn-based French filmmaker Michel Gondry directs feature films, shorts, commercials, and what he may be best known for, music videos. Much of his work is full of practical and digital effects, often of the hand-made do-it-yourself variety, always clever, and typically animated.

While many people stiffen and become more conservative as they age, Michel has retained the natural enthusiasm of youth to experiment creatively and to release and publish all sorts of work fearlessly. This DVD menu screen from one of Michel’s music video collections illustrates his playful approach to art:

Michel’s longest music video directing relationship is with Bjork. He directed the video for “Human Behavior” from her Debut record, and most recently directed the video for “Crystalline” from her Biophilia record, with animation direction by Peter Sluszka:

Michel draws and creates books. Picturebox has published three of his books. One is a comic book and another is a book/film collaboration with artist Julie Doucet.

He recently released Haircut Mouse, a short multimedia animated film:

Here is a trio of Rubik’s Cube solving videos. The first utilizes a simple filmmaking trick before escalating into the use of digital effects in videos two and three:

Here is a teaser for his film Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?, the “animated conversation” with Noam Chomsky:

You can see more work at Michel’s website and watch “TV Gondry” for a brief commercial of Michel pushing his products:

Currently on display at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, Spectacle: The Music Video is the first ever exhibition to celebrate the artform that was once the bread and butter of MTV. Curators Jonathan Wells and Meg Grey Wells put together an impressive spread of 300 music videos in beautifully designed exhibition.

While most music videos in the exhibition were featured in looped groupings on wall-mounted monitors, the videos that received their own, stand-alone installations were ones that had accompanying props or assets left over from production. For example, the four jumpsuits worn in the video for OK GO’s “This Too Shall Pass” are hung on the wall next to a video monitor. Another corner is filled with a giant model of the anthropomorphic milk carton from Blur’s “Coffee and Tea.” Also on display are a few pieces from “Tonight, Tonight,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ homage to Georges Méliès’ “A Trip to the Moon.”

Stop motion and 2-D animation are heavily represented in the show. Piles of colorful yarn and original storyboards comprise an installation for Steriogram’s “Walkie Talkie Man,” directed by Michel Gondry. As one of the most prolific and creative music video directors in the past two decades, Gondry’s work received the most gallery space by far. Another corner is accented with bold LEGO pieces while an accompanying monitor plays “Fell in Love With A Girl,” the iconic music video that pulled The White Stripes into the mainstream.

Original drawings from “Take On Me” by A-ha are on display as a reminder of the video’s landmark status in pop culture. Director Steve Barron combined pencil-sketch animation, rotoscoping and live action for a total of 3,000 frames that took four months to complete. It is still one of the most memorable music videos of all time, and was the first to push a song to number one one the charts.

Several monitors around the gallery space display curated lumps of animated music videos, but there were a few notably absent or barely mentioned: Kanye’s Bakshi-inspired video for “Heartless,” Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” and anything by The Gorillaz. Of course it’s impossible to satisfy everyone’s expectations, so the curators devised a lounge provided by Vevo where patrons can select and watch their favorite music videos.

Approaching this exhibit, I wondered how the curators, who are self-proclaimed products of the MTV generation, could keep their nostalgia in check. At times they can’t, and the exhibition is more celebratory than critical. The present and future of the music video is never fully confronted, specifically in the context of a digital era with services like YouTube and Vimeo. A small installation of Arcade Fire’s ventures into interactive music videos was perhaps the most current exploration of the medium on display.

Where the exhibition shines, however, is establishing the history of music videos, tracing their roots back to the earliest sound films of the 1920s. Included was a mention of “Colour Box” by Len Lye, a 1935 experimental animated short set to a Cuban dance beat. The narrative thread continues on, showing how The Beatles, Queen, David Bowie and several experimental artists contributed to the establishment of the music video as a definitive medium.

The exhibition, which is absolutely worth seeing, is currently on loan from Contemporary Arts Center in Cinnicinnati. With any hope, the show will become even more accessible and take part in a national tour. And now that Billboard has decided to include YouTube views in its rankings, the music video could once again be a driving force worth rediscovering.

We caught a screening of GREEN HORNET last night, and despite all the dire forebodings of a superhero movie starring Seth Rogen , it was charming, very funny, and worthy of repeated viewings.

As I tweeted last night, the mix of Rogen, director Michel Gondry and scripters Rogen and Evan Goldberg (SUPERBAD) should have aroused no worry whatsoever as long as they were allowed to play to their considerable strengths — which mostly involve comedy. And in fact GREEN HORNET is an action comedy — quite goofy in spots, visually inventive in others, but always putting its characters first. It has the deliberately awkward mise-en-scene of all Gondry films, but way more propulsive action.

It also does many things that every other superhero movie does, and that makes it refreshing. For instance, it’s very clear that Kato is the brains, muscle, and hero of the piece. Played by Asian superstar Jay Chou, I would rather see a sequel about Kato. Also, Britt Reid does not successfully romance the girl, Lenore, played by Cameron Diaz. I had low expectations, given the Diaz casting, but Lenore holds her own.

As the villain, Cristolph Waltz is great, of course, and he even has a character arc that is really a character arc instead of being a cypher. (The arc does extend from an absurd premise, but this IS a comedy.)

If GREEN HORNET reminded me of anything, it’s a live action Wallace and Gromit movie — and yes that is high praise. It has the same central character dynamic — a clueless hero who relies on his long suffering “assistant”. Kato even makes Britt breakfast, just like Gromit.

Not that there isn’t an unevenness of tone in the film. In an interview Rogen