by Rollin Bishop, Kambole Campbell

It has been a week, folks. In lieu of the interview we'd intended to run today, what with the world as it is and our lives complicated enough without all of that even, we've decided to instead take it a bit easy and simply recommend some truly choice animation to spend your weekend watching. Sometimes… sometimes you just have to tune into something else.

NOISEMAN SOUND INSECT - RB

This 1997 short from Studio4°C is available to stream on YouTube every so often — this time until May 14, 2026 — and is absolutely worth your attention. As Catsuka recently noted, the short is directed by Koji Morimoto with character designs and more from Masaaki Yuasa and music from Yoko Kanno.

"It tells of the battle between the Noiseman monster that robs the people of music and controls the town," the official description reads on YouTube, "and the boys and girls who have been freed from the noise spells by the truth of music." The whole thing is only 15 minutes long, so I'll not say much more about Noiseman Sound Insect as you can easily find out for yourself.

SNOW BEAR - KC

You can watch one of this year's frontrunners for various animated shorts awards for free on Youtube! Former Disney artist Aaron Blaise brings some of those classical sensibilities to the hand-drawn, apparently solo-animated (!) Snow Bear, a pretty and rather straightforward story about loneliness which wouldn't feel out of place ahead of a Mouse feature from the 90s (though there are some jokes in here which are a bit more morbid than that company would likely allow). Between this and my Punch Punch recommendation above, perhaps I'm feeling nostalgic for a certain era of animation, but even if I wasn't, I'd recommend checking out Snow Bear. There are perhaps more narratively sophisticated shorts of this past year, but this one is still beautifully crafted – by one guy! – and did I mention you can just watch it on YouTube?

SESAME STREET (IN GENERAL) - RB

Is puppetry animation? The eternal debate continues, but Re:Frame firmly comes down on team "yes" today by pointing out that over a 100 episodes — in full — of Sesame Street are now available on YouTube.

According to the announcement, that makes YouTube now "the largest digital library of Sesame Street content!" It's worth noting that this trove is seemingly split between multiple channels like Sesame Street and Sesame Street Classics, but it's still a very cool archive that's easily accessible. I won't go so far as to say that the long national nightmare of Sesame Street's availability, especially digitally, is over, but I do think this is a massive step in the right direction.

PUNCH PUNCH FOREVER EP 3: "TOOTHLESS AGGRESSION" - KC

Perhaps the rapid-fire rhythm of its jokes already paints Punch Punch Forever as a kind of relic of a millennial internet era, but this is hardly a put-down – if anything the show designed to look like a time capsule, looking like a 90s anime clumsily recorded over something else on the tape (creator Speedoru's ads for their own Patreon are cleverly edited in this way). 

The online series has been steadily trucking along for a little while, but maybe no episode spoke to me more with its alchemical mix of nostalgia and goofy comedy than "Toothless Aggression," which as the title suggests riffs on the absurdity of television which has so often gone hand in hand with anime: pro-wrestling! Though it's named for a specific era of WWE (at the time, WWF) there’s love shown for numerous eras – with demonic versions of more contemporary wrestlers like Asuka alongside homages to The Rock (classic version), Mankind, The Undertaker and Bull Nakano in the opening credits of the fictional "DWF" show the family sit around to watch, with even more homages found in the crowd. (Stardom pro-wrestler Maki Itoh also has a voice role as Mika, the foul-mouthed, bloodshot-eyed girlfriend of both members of a demonic tag team). 

The gags go beyond nods to wrestling of course – an early highlight in the episode has the family recoil in horror as they change the channel to one showing the Lumiere brothers's L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat.Things get even sillier as Gogo and her mother have to team up and wrestle the supernaturally muscular Yubisaku and Shirisaku, as Speedoru and their team of artists create hilarious action through quick sight gags and Looney Tunes cartoon physics (not to mention, some incredibly well-timed screams). The tone occasionally tips a little too internet humor for my blood, mainly with the appearance of "Jushin Aniki," but the rest is wonderful. Recommending this maybe betrays a still-childish sense of humor on my part, but no matter.