With fast changing visuals and moods, an artist presents his family’s twentieth-century story. Although Stalin’s sour image is in the background, a boy’s childhood is a dreamlike world of colors and a butterfly. War interrupts youth and romance. Hitler, concentration camps, and conflagration finally give way to a mother and child (father is missing in the war), birds, beauty and more butterflies. The child grows. Pop culture arrives from America, but the grim shadow of Stalinism remains. The artist leaves to study in the West. Art, animation, sex, and love nourish him. He earns a diploma!
Category: Animation
Too fast a pace of life in overcrowded, noisy and polluted cities make people sick, neuroses is a common occurrence. A man is trying to sleep but noises keep him up. Trying to stop the noise he reveals a bizarre mixture of sounds and images. The film explores what can happen to a man irritated by noise when all he wants is to peacefully read his newspaper. From being peaceful the man turns dangerous. He is ready to destroy.
This ecologically-minded film builds on the contrasts of idyllic, untouched nature and small communities versus the world of rigid, faceless, gigantic machine monstrosities. This film that was created at the time of mass demonstrations against the levelling of Transylvanian villages and the barrage system on the Danube in the late 1980s was inspired by the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin about a Siberian village flooded because of the construction of a hydroelectric power station.
A young boy and girl, dressed in costumes based on Dutch traditional clothes, find their idyllic, windmill-laden countryside is being over-run by unfeeling, unthinking mechanical men that lay waste to everything in their path. The cartoon (note the title) was a very thinly veiled propaganda film in support of the Netherlands resistance fighters during Nazi occupation in World War 2 (The film was completed when Nazi Germany had completely occupied the Netherlands).
David Anderson’s waking dream is a poetic animated journey through the rich fantasy life of a child’s unconscious, combining elaborate cut-outs, intricate drawn cell animation and live action. A young boy finds himself in a mysterious express train travelling through a forbodeing and surreal landscape.
An animated collage of the director’s favorite things, in a variety of animation styles. Among the things are large-eyed children, unicorns, flowers, and many more.
An eschatological look at Judgment Day on this now aged continent. A film requiem to western civilization and its barbarism, through allegories and symbols and a controversial perspective on the new Middle Ages.
The fauna of the megalopolis, the jungle of the supermarket, the bedlam of brothels and bars, the effect of the bars in the fog, the swaying ears of corn, the swaying of men hanging from the gallows, the ripple of water – seen by the eye of the animator in harmony and conflict and accompanied by the satirical, mocking, but sometimes pure lyrical music of Erik Satie.
