
A deep dive into a snowstorm of structural chaos and a blizzard of exploding gestural animation.
6.5By accident, Cedric (Goofy), replaces his master, Sir Loinsteak, in the armor just before the joust with champion Sir Cumference.
7.0GrandPat travels through alternate dimensions and timelines to get home.
7.0The toys throw Ken and Barbie a Hawaiian vacation in Bonnie's room.
7.0Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.
8.1On an idyllic beach in the Pacific Northwest, curiosity gets the better of a young raccoon whose frustrated parent attempts to keep them both safe.
6.2Ella Blake, a stop-motion animator struggling to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother, embarks upon the creation of a film that becomes the battleground for her sanity. As Ella’s mind starts to fracture, the characters in her project take on a life of their own.
6.4Monty Citymouse invites his cousin Abner Countrymouse for a visit and shows him the ways of the big city, including traps, eating quietly, and busy traffic.
6.7The villainous Nekron and his mother, Queen Juliana, plot against the human race from their frigid fortress. Creating mass destruction with huge glaciers, mother and son incur the wrath of Larn, a warrior whose entire village was destroyed by ice. When Nekron's underlings kidnap the beautiful Princess Teegra, Larn sets out to rescue her, assisted by the fierce and enigmatic Darkwolf.
7.7When Day, a sunny fellow, encounters Night, a stranger of distinctly darker moods, sparks fly! Day and Night are frightened and suspicious of each other at first, and quickly get off on the wrong foot. But as they discover each other's unique qualities--and come to realize that each of them offers a different window onto the same world-the friendship helps both to gain a new perspective.
6.0An animated retelling of ‘Night of the Living Dead’, in which a group of people in a rural farmhouse struggle to survive the threat of bloodthirsty zombies.
6.3The librarian of the town of New Penzance introduces six animated segments illustrating Suzy's favorite books.
7.2A series of 30 sketches, following the hilarious antics of various characters from a galaxy, far, far away.
6.6On the heels of successfully escaping a deadly digital trap, the members of the Justice League emerge in their own world to discover that Grimm, ravenous creatures from Remnant, have overtaken Earth! In order to defeat the monsters, they must call on their new friends – Team RWBY – for help!
7.2When things go bad in Beantown, top assassin Killer Bean is called to clean-up the mess. Detective Cromwell finds himself in the middle between Killer Bean and mob boss Cappuccino.
6.5On Motunui, Maui tries to catch a fish with his magical fishhook, only to be comically foiled by the ocean.
7.2Buster Moon dreams up a star-studded spectacle set to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" in this animated short featuring characters from the hit "Sing" films.
7.3While looking for her cat, a young woman and some kids find an abandoned building where strange things happen and the rules of physics don't always apply. Part of the Animatrix collection of animated shorts set in the Matrix universe.
6.7Donald needs a log for his fire. Unfortunately, the one he picks is occupied by a couple of chipmunks and their stash of acorns. When he cuts it down, Chip and Dale fall out, but their acorns stay behind, so they work at putting out Donald's fire and retrieving their stash. Donald, of course, takes this as calmly and cheerfully as you would expect.
6.5An adventure about two Minions who make a daring (though temporary) escape from jail. As they navigate the chaos of their breakout, their antics showcase the Minions' signature blend of resourcefulness and mischief, resulting in a short filled with hilariously unpredictable moments.
7.3The villains from the popular animated Disney films are gathered at the House of Mouse with plans to take over. Soon, the villains take over the house and kick out Mickey, Donald and Goofy. It's all up to Mickey and his friends to overthrow evil and return the House of Mouse to normal--or as close to normal as it gets.
6.0Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.
0.0A jazzy film in which the spectator is forced to look with the ears and listen with the eyes. An abstract film drawn directly on the computer.
0.0Rainer Kohlberger’s abstract film was created entirely without a camera. Through digital algorithms, he precisely arranged a rhythm of light and shadow that pulsates off the screen into our physical space with blinding intensity. The presence of light is almost felt as we are sucked into the image to become its ghostly accomplice. As we leave the theatre, the optical vibrations continue to haunt us.
6.0A categorical accumulation of abstract patterns. Lines, colours and sounds obey an impenetrable logic. A quiet film that dares to be resolutely experimental. Chaotic equations by the Chinese mathematician Wang Lin are tackled by an analogue computer, a small battery of surplus high-frequency oscillators and Joost Rekveld.
6.0An abstract animation with a motif of a dragonfly, and a complex multi-exposure landscape of a field and a woman's naked body overlap.
7.6A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.
4.8Mamori 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.
0.0Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.
0.0A mathematical play on one repeated movement. It imparts a sense of possibilities: that something simple can produce complex and unexpected patterns. As with an atom, the variety of possibilities from a base movement is potentially infinite.
7.3Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.
7.2This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstrates his working method.
0.0A film unmade-- That is, Survage's film was never realized in the traditional sense-- At the time, such a project was beyond technological possibility. His pioneering efforts to combine luminous, expressive painting and the moving picture were further curtailed by the outbreak of WWI. Some have taken it upon themselves to 'animate' his watercolor plates in attempts to set his dream into motion.
7.5Three memories that become one. An attempt to merge heterogeneous materials: a film sequence shot in Rome, a photo from the 1930s, a noisy soundtrack. Fragmented lines, exploding bass frequencies and flickering.
10.0Claire 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.
We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background.
5.5A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .
6.2Early Abstractions is a collection of seven short animated films created by Harry Everett Smith between 1939 and 1956. Each film is between two and six minutes long, and is named according to the chronological order in which it was made. The collection includes Numbers 1–5, 7, and 10.
6.6A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”