Les Films de Man Ray

The walls of video rental shops in Japan are lined with hundreds upon hundreds of animation DVDs, but experimental and art animation on DVD are rare. To remedy this situation, Image Forum put together this showcase of the work of contemporary avant-garde animators trained in Kyoto and Tokyo.

A girl who was floating freely in the water accidentally gets her skin cut by a sailboat passing by. The story is derived from personal experience, recreating the senses of women in love and the unique inner sense of time through creation.

An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.

A lonesome man at the threshold of death finds himself trapped in a place called the Endless.

A Sentença

A four-dimensional short anime will start at the very beginning of Shibuya Crossing, that is, 10,000 years in the past. The anime is part of a collaborative project helmed by Yoshitoshi Shinomiya. It features a hybrid of animation and live-action. The short was screened on Shibuya's Crossing screens and a YouTube-friendly version was posted as well. (Source: ANN)

In an urban Indian city, A struggling actor battles for his career, but his friend who loses money in a scam deal commits an action that puts both of their lives in danger. The three last days before the incident follows the struggling actor, an ambitious filmmaker, a wannabe hustler, an opportunist, a lover and two cinephile thugs, through an inter-twining vignette of their lives.

A gloomy tale or a completely innocent family picnic on the open air ...

Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen gets his own story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy meets boy!

16 mm, color, 3:35 or 10 min. Study for No. 11. "An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballah in the form of a collage. The final scene shows Agaric mushrooms growing on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum."

UUFO consists of 6 short chapters/stories. Each describes a memory. Dealing with conflicting interpretations of China from the 1960s onwards, UUFO contrasts past generations’ stories with contemporary perceptions. UUFO stands for Universal Unidentified Flying Object.

A lucid dream turned nightmarish reality. A ship sinking into a world of fear. A short film that’s mostly puppetry by one of America's most prolific twentieth century artists.

Music by Dick Connette from his album, Too Sad for the Public Vol. 1: Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade. Suzzy Roche sings the vocal. Dick’s lyrics were inspired by the reknowned photography book, Wisconsin Death Trip.

An AI takes millions of inputs and rehashes them into something semi-new. The same thing human brain does when sleeping. Humans call it "dreams".

Under the impetus of the 75th anniversary of the bamboo top-handle bags, the House presents a contemporary retelling of an ancient Japanese story entitled ‘Taketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter).’ Makoto Nagahisa stages the plot of finding oneself, along with true love, in a Tokyo betwixt and between reality and a dream. Dressed in looks from the Gucci Love Parade collection, Hikari Mitsushima, Aoi Yamada, and Eita Nagayama star in the story shedding a new light on the Gucci Bamboo 1947 and Gucci Diana Beloved lines.

One room, two half bodies, a silent relationship.

Animation, also of a new order in the recent series of short works. Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form, again to Satie’s piano music. Ideally, the film should be projected on a 30" wide white card sitting on a music stand, center stage of a large auditorium or music hall, with sound from the projector piped into the big speaker system. The film is most effective this way, but can be shown normal-size also

Jours de mes années

Prelude 14 begins in deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficient yellow to break up all hard-edge form and give a molten aspect to the mixtures of shapes.

The corner of a street is matched and mixed with the chant of a bird recorded on that same street. A symbiotic relationship is triggered: the rapid and successively repetitive montage cuts between the image of the street and the corners of the video frame itself produce new textures and shapes in our brain, whilst the sound follows the same rhythmic movements by emphasizing different “corners” (frequencies) from the bird’s singing. The energetic potency stemming from the junction of these elements creates a new image that is almost tactitle, maleable and rippling. The result is a somewhat humorous operation of the portuguese word "corner" throughout the different stages of making the piece, finally unveiling a piercing physical and kinetic experience for all the corners of our eyes and ears.