'The Horse Raised By Spheres' is a Rabbit-Hole of Madness

It's not easy being a horse.

Two weeks ago, animator David O'Reilly posted the URL "THEHORSERAISEDBYSPHERES.COM" via his twitter feed. Seemingly in conjunction with a premiere event for this year's Sundance film festival, the address is an interactive text-based web portal to the titular short of a sentient talking horse haunted by his inability to make friends with the other "normal" talking horses grazing on the other side of a field. 

The portal also extends to five other previously unreleased shorts, each one more curiously unsettling than the last. Gaze into the deep, click past the break, and dive into the ineffable abyss that is "The Horse Raised by Spheres".

David O'Reilly's 'Heaven's Countryland' is Almost As Strange As The Reality It's Based On

I'm not one for pulling the "real-world" into the topic of posts, but given all that's been happening lately in regards to North Korea and the Sony hack and the indefinite suspension of The Interview's release, I thought it would be apt to turn some attention to David O'Reilly's terrifically animated short series for Adult Swim, Heaven's Countryland.

North Korea is a notoriously isolationist country known for its perpetual raw-nerve feud with its neighboring sister country. It's also most famously know for caricaturing the United States with claims of dick-dastardly do-no-goodery so absurd that they more often miss the point of legitimate criticism. I think O'Reilly and South African animator Mike Scott managed to encapsulate that paranoid vibe of personality worship and farcical weirdness perfectly in this 4-part series. Check out the rest after the break!

Please Say Something

Earlier today we posted a video of David O'Reilly's most recent animation, The External World. While that was a collection of non-sequitur surrealist micro-films that lampoons the art world and modern world, this serves a more traditional narrative structure. Please Say Something is an episodic tale about a floundering relationship between a cat and mouse, who act as a personification of all the unsettling marital issues that has exasperated our culture for decades. It traverses a cycle of emotions and feelings ranging from charming, to cute, distressing, and uplifting. 

If David O'Reilly sounds familiar, his animation and illustration were both used in the adorable indie flick Son of Rambow. His viral Octocat videos also made waves across the internet, as he channeled his jejune alter-ego, Randy Peters. After viewing several of O'Reilly's works, it's safe to say he certainly has an eye for animation, graphic design and satirical cartooning. (For related artists, see: Takashi Murakami and Chris Ware.)