I made an animated short called Sticks to the Wall. It played at the 90 second quickies:
http://vimeo.com/8019775
While screening it, I heard someone shout, “Haha! Stink lines!” Which is a sentiment I approve of. Stink lines are weird if you think about it. It’s like a shared synesthesia; we’ve established that wavy lines represent stink. I’ve been getting really interested lately in tropes,* that can represent something in a non-literal fashion. You get a lot more of that out of comics than movies, since even basic things like showing someone speaking rely on weird little things like speech bubbles. But you have a few in movies, too. Thought is usually portrayed as a voice-over. Using animation gives you a lot more freedom to use tropes that you couldn’t use in live-action.
So what I kind of like with this cartoon is getting to combine the cartoon tropes with the Spaghetti western motifs.
*Tropes in the real meaning of the word. (IE: Non-literal representations.) Not to be confused with cliches, or common motifs, or archetypes.