"Independent art animation is the vision of individual filmmakers who create art for adults that is enchanting, exciting, whimsical, funny, contemplative, and/or serious. Yet most audiences never see these delightful films. Although museums such as MoMA screen them, they are not shown regularly because museums are designed to display still paintings and sculpture, not film. Meanwhile, commercial movie theaters don’t show art shorts. So art animation for adults gets lost between venues, rarely shown to the public outside of international animation festivals.

The Jacob Burns Film Center is pioneering programs to show art animation to a broad local audience. For the past four summers, we’ve shown an animated short for adults before each first-run feature as part of our "Animation Shorts Suite" series.

This monthly series looks at the limitless possibilities of art animation – and also at the incredibly labor-intensive business of producing the hundreds of thousands of drawings that make an animated film."