Midweek animated free movie madness

This Wednesday afternoon finds our UK site users being offered the opportunity to check out the crude and unapologetically rude antics of some line-drawn lunatics. We have ten animated movies available to watch for free, with their casts of crazed cowboys, obscene aliens, and cannibal diners all emanating from the strange imagination of award-winning British film-maker Phil Mulloy.

Mulloy has been an acclaimed figure in UK animation for nearly two decades now – though he came to the discipline relatively late, having worked for nearly 20 years in live-action film and TV first. Using a rough brush and ink style, he first gained widespread attention for his series of Cowboys shorts in 1991 – Slim Pickin's, That's Nothin', Murder!, The Conformist, High Noon, Outrage! - all six of which are compiled here for you to view.

In 1994, Mulloy brought his raw, scabrously witty approach to bear on humanity itself, in The History of the World and The Ten Commandments (the latter of which is showing in Parts 1 and 2 here on Indie). Of the inspirations behind the curious silhouette figures who populate his films, Mulloy explained in an interview with Animatic Magazine, “While researching a script set in 17th century England, I came across numerous pamphlets written by dissenting puritans. Many had simple black and white woodcuts printed in them. These primitive images, that illustrated the political debates of the times, appealed to me. Their childlike simplicity and untutored line gave them strength of design that retained its power across the centuries. I also remember being influenced by an exhibition of Mexican Day of the Dead art in the late eighties. The stark vision of mankind being exactly the same beneath the flesh really impressed me, as did the vigour and life with which these images of death were made. My skeletal figures try to carry this same vision.” Mulloy puts these skeletal figures to use in nearly every taboo-busting scenario of which you can conceive, with his movies regularly seeing more blood spilt than the House of Blue Leaves did during the Bride's visit in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and more carelessly flapping todgers than any of Dr. Manhattan's scenes in Watchmen.

These identified tendencies are all given full vent in The Sound of Music, a satire on the bourgeoisie of which Buñuel himself would surely have heartily approved. A gala dinner provides the setting for a spiralling sequence of grotesquely madcap events, with some vacuum cleaners being put to particularly worrying use. Comparably spiky are both The Chain (in which murder, mayhem and deception follows the disposal of a child's artwork) and The Sexlife of a Chair (a mock educational short exploring the amorous existence of the eponymous bit of furniture), although The Wind of Changes offered an atypically sober expression of the Mulloy aesthetic – it being a biographical film about the director's frequent musical collaborator Alex Balanescu.

Computer techniques were used to supplement brush and ink in 2000's Intolerance and 2001's Intolerance II: The Invasion, both of which revolved around Earth's terse relations with the extraordinary inhabitants of the planet Zog. As darkly comic as any prior Mulloy outings, both movies neatly embody the healthily cynical counterpoint that the British animator offers to Disney-style regimented cartoon cuteness.