Dive Into 100 Years of Spanish Animation With These Shorts, Features & More Showing in NYC

If it could, one gets the sense that the Museum of Modern Art would rather spend the next couple of months holidaying in Spain. After news that the New York institution will be hosting a full (!) retrospective of that country’s most celebrated living filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar, they also announced that they’ll be giving a major retro of the little-known art and industry of Spanish animation.

“From Doodles to Pixels: Over a Hundred Years of Spanish Animation” will feature political shorts, animated music videos, TV ads, Europe’s first animated color feature, Garbancito de la Mancha (1945), and everything in between. Do you want to see an AIDS-era love story told through simple notepad animation? How about a stop-motion short about youthful drinking? Or perhaps you want to see riffs on the Western with stick figures, feminist twists on European folk tales in the style of medieval tapestries, or a tale of political violence animated with sand? Seriously, this series has everything.

Screening over 60 short films there’s no shortage of inventive flicks to catch during this week-long affair. In case you need some help narrowing down what you want to watch, we’ve come up with our top 10 picks which you can catch in any of the 8 different programs.

“From Doodles to Pixels: Over a Hundred Years of Spanish Animation” runs from Sept 7-15, 2016 at the Museum of Modern Art.