This isn’t your normal “Saturday Morning Cartoon” lineup! As a medium, animation is a fantastic storytelling device, allowing a filmmaker’s imagination to run wild, beyond the boundaries of traditional photography. It can showcase our greatest desires and darkest dreams, as seen in the deep recesses of our unbridled minds. Master filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has called animation “the purest form of art” and has urged people to stop sugar-coating animated narratives and thinking of them as only for children: “it’s urgent to see real life in animation.”

Even in 2023, it’s still extremely uncommon to see queer and trans stories represented in animated features, let alone Hollywood animated-productions. So it’s truly wonderful to be able to present this extremely varied collection of animated short films at ImageOut this year. From student films, to independent studios; from narrative to experimental, these shorts present truly wide representation of not only our community, but also various styles of animation. From hand-drawn to 3D-rendered; paint overlays supplementing live action, to experimental motion typography, there’s a little bit of everything in this block.

The programs concludes with the 20-minute Christopher at Sea — where a young man joins a cargo ship to discover how solitude, fantasy and obsession lead so many men to sea — which was nominated for Best Short at the Sundance, SXSW, and Annecy film festivals. —MATT DETURCK

Note: This program contains full-frontal nudity.

Our 2023 Shorts Programs are made possible through the generosity of long-time ImageOut supporters David D. Emert and Jon P. Templin.