In this episodic animated fantasy from France, an art teacher interprets a series of six fairy tales (each involving a prince or princess) with the help of two precocious students. Princes and Princesses was created using a special style of cutout animation, with black silhouetted characters performing the action against backlit backdrops in striking colors.
I told a story, Kirikou and the Sorceress, that reached a large number of people. It was the first time in my life. But this film was not my first one. I had also made short films, with a very limited distribution. Nobody saw them. I am lucky enough now to introduce them to you, to make these little mechanisms run again; they are the result of perseverance and passion. Besides the almost forgotten past, I have added a dance of today, which I conceived for Björk. Also something of the future, a post-scriptum to my film "Azur & Asmar". In addition to the films, I try to explain the happy magic of these bits of nothing which became my life. Michel Ocelot
An experimental short film by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.
Suicidal poet Archy tries to end his life by jumping off a bridge, but awakens to find he has assumed the life of a cockroach and has become a part of a community of creatures living in a newspaper office. He also discovers that he can still write poetry, using a typewriter, and begins to enjoy his new life. Archy develops deep feelings for the lovely but self-destructive cat Mehitabel, but will have to fight to win her from bad-boy tomcat Bill.
Wasteland is a five-part anthology film that deals with isolation, mental illness, and the subjectivity of reality. Each of the five parts can be watched individually, but when viewed in sequence, each story brings out a more interesting and distinct context to its respective pieces.
In a white lace universe, three inventors create machines which are both pretty and useful. Unfortunately people do not understand them...
A nostalgia trip in the enigmatic labyrinth of the passed childhood.
Animation using cutout animation to craft a bizarre science fiction experiment. Moving spheres, such as balloons and bubbles, are superimposed on static backgrounds to suggest travel and discovery.
Film shows the story of Papageno (the one from Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute"), who wants a mate, yet has difficulties getting one.
As winter gives way to spring in the Russian wilderness, a crafty fox promptly expels a defenceless hare from his warm, comfortable residence, claiming the house for himself and leaving the poor owner to sleep outside under the stars. An assortment of compassionate animals – a wolf, a bear, a bull – take pity on the disheartened hare, and attempt to evict the cunning fox, but to no avail. Along comes a hilariously militant rooster, proud and tenacious, who marches into the hare's house and doesn't give up until the fox has been hounded back into the wilderness.
The story of the evolution of life on Earth in animated form.
We hear the distant ring of Saturn.
"The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully moulded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death – the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante’s Purgatorio, de Chirico’s stitched plain. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan." —Canyon Cinema
The way bureaucracy works is told by men in the frames.
Two duelling birds get the urge to change their plumage. A blue jay wants to be decked out in the green of cedar, and a loon dons the burnished red of oak leaves, but neither bird foresees the consequences of vanity.
A small mole is looking for a fallen star in the night forest where everyone else seem to have already found their own treasures.
A family pod of three dolphins navigates decay as an inevitable register while also having a secret ascension to a higher ground.
A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. A collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks death ... a parabolic parable.
There is a hint of an under water circus, and many of the performers are acrobats. The sea water, if that's what it is, is yellowish brown. A full-faced sun rises from the Sun King's cradle, while a moon of Saturn circles the planet. The cut-out animation moves airily through a time-distorted world, where dizziness barely maintains a balance, and conventional time-sense disappears. The music of John Davis, which has been slowed to half speed, reverberates eerily throughout the pulsing series of performances, and one wonders whether in the next scene one can catch one's balance. The timing throughout is musical, and suggests a barely upheld world of sanity; of course the dream world creeps into the conscious mind's puritanical sense of propriety, rendering a secondary sense of unbalance facing trial at the bar of...whatever comes to mind. Delirium?
A square dances.