Cartoons For Big Kids

By Scott Smith in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 8, 2005 5:46PM

For anyone who like the animated sequences in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy movie better than the parts with actual people, you’ll want to head to The Gene Siskel Center tomorrow night.

Chicagoist was perfectly happy swooning over Zooey Deschanel and Martin Freeman when we saw the film, but we were impressed at how the filmmakers dealt with the long expositional portions of the book that describe information from The Guide itself. The group responsible for those animated flights of fancy is the London-based Shynola, a collective of film artists. Started in 1999, Shynola began creating clever, short films before working on videos for Blur, Junior Senior and Stephen Malkmus.

As most of Shynola’s time this year has been spent on the Hitchhiker’s film, they haven’t released any other short-form videos recently but you can see a sampling of their work tomorrow night at 8:15 at the Gene in a presentation called Shit From Shynola. Their Malkmus and Junior Senior videos are included as well as their acclaimed student film, The Littlest Robot.

Click here for a BBC story on Shynola.

Photo: Shynola.com