Ideas in Search of Light

The working-class Smiths change their initially sunny views on World War I after the five boys of the family witness the harsh reality of trench warfare.

Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.

Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.

Hiroshima, summer of 1945. A young girl named Nobuko saves a starving kitten from crows. She wants to keep the kitten, but her parents dismiss the idea. Nobuko eventually convinces them to let her keep it. She and her brother Makoto name the cat Kuro. Kuro quickly brings joy and laughter to the family. As World War II takes its toll on Japan, it becomes harder for Nobuko and her family to care for Kuro. One August morning, Kuro begins acting strangely...

In this surrealistic and free-form follow-up to the Monkees' television show, the band frolic their way through a series of musical set pieces and vignettes containing humor and anti-establishment social commentary.

Repetition and distortion drive this audiovisual collaboration between composer Lux Prima and visual artist Max Hattler, where fuzzy analogue music and geometric digital animation collide in an electronic feedback loop, spawning arrays of divisional articulations in time and space.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

Hand painted directly onto film stock by Margaret Tait, this film features animated dancing figures, accompanied by authentic calypso music.

Untitled / Aubrac

Claire is composed of digital scans and blow-ups of a series of three ink-on-paper artworks created in 2012 by French-Spanish researcher, publisher and artist Claire Latxague. While collecting drawings, written documents and other printed materials for a (yet unreleased) project called Un film de papier, I’ve stumbled upon Latxague’s artwork, entitled À la renverse. The blow-ups were made in an attempt of unearthing cartographic imagery in abstract compositions.

In the darkness of a cave, one man who had never seen even his own figure found a hollow flooded with light. An expression of a chaotic world. This experimental graduation film is a mixture of different animation techniques

An abstract film on the music 'Unfinished' 8th Symphony, part 1, by Franz Schubert by Oerd van Cuijlenborg

In Scratch both the animation and the soundtrack are abstract. The movie is a conversation of sounds and images. Soundtrack and animation are scratched directly on 35 mm film.

The journey before the inevitable, the clock starts ticking, life begins and ends.

Two baby squirrels ask grandpa to explain what "men" are when he comes in singing "peace on earth, goodwill to men". Grandpa tells the story of man's last war. This classic animation short was an Academy Award Best Short Subject, Cartoons nominee.

A group of young mice is in the ruins of a church, practicing singing for an upcoming service. After singing an adulterated version of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," the mice wonder about the last line, "Good will to men." One of them asks the choirmaster, an old mouse, "What are men?" The old mouse explains that they all killed each other off by building bigger and more destructive weapons, first guns, then missiles, then bombs.

A visualizer for Phoebe Bridgers' Copycat Killer EP, featuring four songs originally released on the Grammy-nominated album Punisher, with new orchestral instrumentation and arrangements by Rob Moose.

Aspiring writer Lucy Simon embarks on a psychedelic road trip to the planet Mars with her brash, unnamed drug dealer behind the wheel in this hallucinogenic space adventure presented entirely through the use of close-up photography.

The idea of JAM was conceived while I was attending the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2008.After returning to Japan, I soon began making the film and completed it in four months.This film is based on a very simple idea: the increasingly varied the sounds, the greater is the number of creatures. I wanted to rid myself of the frustrating experience of making Devour Dinner, which was highly unsatisfactory from the viewpoint of the movement in the film. My intention in this film was to fill the screen with chaotic movements.

This is no animation, it's one picture. Short experimental film by Mirai Mizue