Content has been slow this week and if that has caused displeasure, then please accept this superior animated peace offering. Yowie and the Magpie is a fascinating short animation from UK artist Dylan White. In it, a son recounts the legend of his father, an avid hunter whose collection lacked only one mythical beast…

Bright and clean is White’s illustrator-style and it a pleasure to behold, yet the tale itself is wickedly dark and powerfully written by screenwriter Tim Telling. It’s an odd pairing of tones that, in a way, blunts the power of the script, a bona fide gem that deftly fuses myth, legend and origin-stories into a 3min wrapper. White’s visual imagination however, when recounting the myth of the Yowie or in the shot pictured above, exhibits a splendid sense of design and whimsy. Ultimately both elements have much to recommend them.

White is a freelance animator, illustrator and art director. He collaborated with a ton of great artists on Knife Party‘s Coalition of the Willing, a fascinating motion-narrative-political essay that we covered as part of the 2010 Vimeo Awards.  Yowie and the Magpie is a personal project created in part through a 2007 UK Film Council/Film London grant as part of the the Digital Pulse program. That was year after the YouTube/Future Shorts favorite Peter and Ben was awarded the same grant, and the year before SotW Presents fave A Family Portrait received one.

This has been a common thread in UK film over the last several years as many splendid short films have materialized due to the largesse and vision of the UK Film Council and its talent schemes. We’ve featured a lot of them here (might be a good subject for a future playlist), but Yowie and the Magpie might be one of the last to surface online.  The reallocation of UK resources under Dave Cameron’s government made a casualty of the UK Film Council, which was axed this last fall. In theory the various regional councils like Film London will still be funded through various schemes to promote short films, but the leadership of the UK FIlm Council will be missed.  I hope this doesn’t cause us to look back on the 2002-2010 era as an anomalous, high-water mark in the history of UK short film.