Winter Days
April 4, 2009
Take 35 stanzas from the poems of Basho (Japanese poet), give 35 different animators to animate each stanza and walla, you have an anime titled Winter Days. For example, the above animation by Raoul Servais is on this following stanza:
My grass hut – where I offer the heron my belonging
Having to hide while the hair grows back
As you may have guessed, 35 different animators mean very wide range of animation styles, which sometimes can be beautiful, sometimes not. As for me, there were things like clay animation that I don’t particulary fancy, as well as some really stupid and (to me) kind of pointless shorts, but there were some great ones as well, so I guess it’s worth a look only if to see some short stanzas by this Japanese poet translated into animated medium.
these two segments I really liked
these ones not as much, but still interesting
...and the others not really that interesting. So let's see, that's about 8 good shorts out of 35. Hmm. Well, the choice is yours.
April 4, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Yes, Winter Days is great
It was nice to see a wide variety of styles 
I posted some of the clips I liked sometime ago.
April 5, 2009 at 8:55 am
Haha, well, it’s nice to see a wide variety in that at least many of them I liked, even though most of them wasn’t particularly interesting (but I guess watching fair share of animated shorts can make anyone jaded). I think our taste differ a little bit when it comes to favourite clips from Winter Days though.
April 6, 2009 at 3:32 am
Yes, it is not easy to make something impressive with such a time limit.
Well, I mentioned only some of the animations I liked in that post
Of the ones you mention, I especially liked Reiko Yokosuka’s work. Check out her website 
April 6, 2009 at 4:48 am
I can tell which animation piece you’re talking about by just looking at her site
One word to sum up her work would be sublime.