On DVD: Which DVD Features Alpacas, Vikings, and Talking Plastic Bags?

For most of us, short films are either YouTube daybreakers (if they're funny) or something unseen that still manage to get Oscars every year anyway. In reality, though, short films are just another vast and teeming film subculture spawning and thriving all around us, out of sight, like a termite colony. Since they don't have any substantial commercial role and it's tough to make money from them, of course they're cinema non grata to the mainstream, but you shouldn't need to be told that contemporary filmmaking is sometimes at its ripest, craziest and most inventive in the short form, and to do any kind of keeping up with that secret and unending cataract, you need Wholphin.

Wholphin is the short-film DVD magazine brainchild currently in its eleventh edition and available only through subscription from the ultracool Dave Eggers/McSweeney's publishing factory. The reason it's invaluable is because it's curated without a thought toward fashion or commerciality, and has a distinct but free-range personality all its own. Wholphin can be idiosyncratic and campy and high-minded, but mostly it's hungry, for experience and disorientation and new laughs and originality and visual ordeals the likes of which we haven't seen before. Nothing is off the table -- multiple soundtrack dubbing options have been common, and in every issue, pieces of odd footage or sometimes entire films are used as rotating menu screens. Coming biannually since 2005, the back library includes (amidst eye-searing nature footage, Iranian sitcoms and active science experiments) some of the most spectacular and vital shorts of the last few years, including several Oscar winners.

The centerpiece of Wholpin No. 11 might be Rahmin Bahrani's already famous Plastic Bag, an ecologically-slanted rethink of The Red Balloon in which a supermarket bag narrates its melancholy but aspiring life from "birth" out of the pile at the store to an endless journey of disposability, from windblown trash to landfill imprisonment to finding its proper place in the Pacific Trash Vortex, a mass of free-floating plastic debris twice the size of Texas, north of Hawaii. Bahrani, whose features Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo are critical faves, deftly chose Werner Herzog to read the bag's voice, and the upshot starts out as a gag but evolves into a Herzogian lyric set in a post-human world where plastic trash lives forever.

Other winners: Ariel Kleiman's Young Love, a cryptic Australian romance punctuated by the aftermath of an axe assault and a herd of inquisitive Alpacas; and Tony Stone's utterly gorgeous Out of Our Minds, a wordless epic that conjoins three time periods and stories (Vikings, old-school lumberjacks, and a mid-20th-century woman caught in a car wreck) and features bleeding trees...you tell me. There are no less than two shorts devoted to the irascible, pharmaceutical-fueled legacy of Nixon-era All-Star pitcher Dock Ellis (one animated and one not), recounting among other incidents his infamous no-hitter in 1970 performed under the influence of top-grade LSD. There's also glimpses of an actor trying to land a job on the live-action film of Yogi Bear by taping his interactions with a real bear (he got the role), and three scientists jogging nude around the South Pole in -30 degrees. It's a wonder cabinet, all told.