David Firth of Fat-Pie.com has been making messed up toons for the Net for years, but he took on a new level of twisted brilliance in 2008 with Dog of Man. This subversive ode to loneliness and friendship starts out really strange and finds ways of getting stranger as it goes along. But when you get past the oddness, one begins to rethink all the tear-jerking tales of the ultimate sacrifice that have come before it. Dog stands as a great parasitic twin for Firth's Salad Fingers series.

Stick figure fights litter video sites all over the Net. The trend is rampant. However, none of them come close to the quality of Justsolo's GhostFight. From the fluidly timed animation to the great sound, this stick figure battle takes the genre to a new level of style and skill that hasn't been seen before.

This 2D student short caught my attention on the Net this year for its simple sense of story and its wonderfully executed use of free-form animation. I dare the viewer to name all the design influences that flow through the dream sequence of the prisoner trying to escape his sad life through art. In the end, the conclusion says something profound about the need for art in the current world climate.

How many of you got emailed this video? MUTO wins the coolest concept of 2008 award for sure. The dedication and expertise on display in this nearly seven-minute masterpiece of free-form animation is staggering. When most artists painstakingly try to hide the filmmaking process, Blu puts it on display, making us think about the work that went into making the film as part of the work itself. In doing so, Blu not only presents an experimental exercise in movement, but a comment on the animation process in general.

David O'Reilly played a prank on the world that turned into one of the most debated toons to hit the Web in 2008. Posing as a teen animator named Randy Peters, O'Reilly unleashed five episodes of a "crudely" animated adventure of a half octopus-half cat creature in search of his parents. Randy Peters' animation and storytelling skills mature over the course of the series. O'Reilly's full talents emerge in the end for the climactic battle. O'Reilly set out to prove that slick animation was not needed to entertain people, and in the end he reminds the viewer that most animator's careers started with doodles in a notebook.