Under the Ice

Cosmos of paint unleash a storm of color.

The last conscious moments of Stalin, the solitary tyrant who believes himself immortal. An evocation of the mental chaos of the Little Father of the People who was suffering from delusions of persecution and untold power during the three days of his death throes. And, in fact, is he really dead? In the limbo of the Soviet past, the ghosts from the gulag dream of settling some old scores.

Ocean

Words that end in -ake and start with ch-. A typographic animation.

Words that start with the letter O, P, and R. A typographic animation.

Things you can do with a single sheet of paper.

Floor Tiles

This little film, which juxtaposes animated sand and scratching on 16mm film, was made during studies at the Royal College of Art. The starting point of this film was the sentence "but it's always when you're asleep that I want to talk to you", read on a wall in the underground... a phrase actually taken from a Mano Solo song.

A man plans to eat his lunch in the park, but the local pigeons have other ideas.

Simon the Monk(ey) terrorizes a weird-looking dog, which plays the part of his slave - takes any order from the “master” and gets beaten from time to time. They run through the jungle, meet a monkey-jazz-band, then escape from a tiger and nothing really happens...

Animated segments which might have originally framed live action footage of bakers at work making Wonder Bread and Hostess cakes.

I went to China with hand luggage only. In China, motorcyclists wear the reverse jacket and restaurants serve fish heads, crayfish and eels. The event's employee studies cinema and likes Kung Fu films. I bought vacuum-packed chicken feet.

Oswald and his friend and nemesis Peg-Leg Pete are hobos riding on a train and playing checkers when hilarity ensues

Humorous true-life story about male-female relations. Infatuation and its consequences are depicted in a ironic way: meeting a guy, dancing, having fun, a sexual act. A man, giddy with the charm of a femme fatale, leaves a room. He is followed by failure and doom.

This story takes place in a Ukrainian village. A thievish fox could not resist not eating some poultry. One night he crawled into a house to steal a chicken, but his actions awakened the owners of the house. In an attempt to flee, he fell into a trap. Only the Ouzel could solve all the fox’s problems.

A story about a caterpillar undergoing metaphorphosis in a too-small cocoon.

Petryk Pyatochkin goes to kindergarten and loves to play around. One day he counted elephants so that he could fall asleep with the other children during quiet time. And when he succeeded, Petryk got to Africa in an amazing kindergarten, where he had to take care of baby elephants, who did not miss the opportunity to have fun.

Punctuated with stories from the Bible, the film’s purpose was to reinforce Christian values in the atomic age by condemning the consequences of human conflict with scenes of the crucifixion, lynching and Nazi fascism.

Humorous tales about the life of a little boy. About how he was born without a father and mother, how he was hit by a snow lying on the oven in his hut, how he walked into the woods being a kid, and the miraculous things he had seen there. In his fantasies he could fly, make friends with birds, climb trees, and most importantly – do it all in infancy and without looking at anyone else. Based on poems by Stepan Rudanskyi.

QUICK DREAM, subtitled "A Series of Exorcisms," is the result of this first assignment. As Mouris describes it, “This film is a series of visual experiments with magazine photograph cutouts that make moving collages; coloraid paper; Avery labels; whatever I could think of that might animate. It became the seedbed for everything that followed,” most notably FRANK FILM. As part of the project, the students’ films were subject to a round of guest criticism from artists and filmmakers Robert Breer and Red Grooms, who, as Mouris describes it, “praised our work and encouraged us to continue.” (Yale Film Archive)