Rectangle & Rectangles (1984)

Touch Air

An homage to the influential practice and philosophy of artist Nasreen Mohamedi. The film incorporates Mohamedi’s personal notes and her unique singular vision, drawing upon the aesthetics of the bare line, and its metaphysical journey eliminating physical borders/barriers.

The House

Across 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.

Cat's Cradle

Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and smokes. The cat stretches. There are close-ups of each. The light is dim; a filter accentuates red. A bare foot stands on a satin sheet. A woman disrobes. She pets the cat. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.

Mothlight

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.

Eye Myth

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

The Midnight Parasites

A night when parasites of various green forms devour humans. A cruel food chain that never ceases, and an eternal repetition of life and death. A grotesque and strange parable drawn by Yoji Kuri. Isao Tomita's synthesizer music echoes quietly and eerily.

Metamorphic

She's here. She comes closer. Is she in front of me? Now she, by herself, becomes her.

Film, Film, Film

The trials and tribulations of putting a feature film together.

Forward March, Time!

Soviet animation from Vladimir Tarasov.

Trade Tattoo

Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail. Lye transformed this footage in what has been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create images as complex and multi-layered as a Cubist painting. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dynamic rhythms, the film seeks (in Lye’s words) to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life."

Drux Flux

Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcus…

The Restaurant of Many Orders

A short film based on a story by Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa in which two young British hunters get lost in the woods and discover a strange restaurant. Are the hunters about to discover how it feels to be hunted?

Rejected

A hilarious collection of animated television commercials that were rejected because of their creator's failing grip on sanity.

Millennium Actress

Documentary filmmaker Genya Tachibana has tracked down the legendary actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who mysteriously vanished at the height of her career. When he presents her with a key she had lost and thought was gone forever, the filmmaker could not have imagined that it would not only unlock the long-held secrets of Chiyoko’s life... but also his own.

A Paw Over Dark

A washed up actor performs night after night in a grimy theater to a nearly empty audience. However, everything changes when a clueless dog jumps on stage.

Becoming Air

Breathe deeply: in 3 years, your molecules will circle Earth, as today’s oxygen came from nature.

Yùl and the Snake

13-year-old Yùl has come along with his big brother, Dino, to clinch a bad deal with Mike, a thug with a car and a fearsome dog. When the situation starts to turn sour, a weird snake appears by Yùl's side.

Allegro non troppo

The film is a parody of Disney's Fantasia, though possibly more of a challenge to Fantasia than parody status would imply. In the context of this film, "Allegro non Troppo" means Not So Fast!, an interjection meaning "slow down" or "think before you act" and refers to the film's pessimistic view of Western progress (as opposed to the optimism of Disney's original).

Bag

袋 Fukuro (Japanese for "bag" or "sack") is a 3-minute short film from 2001. It features Pyramid Head and a Lying Figure from Silent Hill 2, the Fukuro Lady, and many monsters from early sketches for Silent Hill 2. The film contains disturbing, surreal imagery.

Spotless Dominoes

A child, a cat, a starry night but, in this world of innocence, dream and magic, obscure forces of evil awaken. This animated short revolves around the adventures of a young, horned boy and a group of six devil-like vermin that can combine themselves to make one large creature.

Demi-Goddesses

The second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society.

Twice Upon a Time

In the world of the Murkworks where nightmares are made, the evil Synonamess Botch hatches a scheme to make non-stop nightmares. Only Ralph and Mumford, misfits from the cheery land of Frivoli where good dreams are made, can stop him.

Yellow Submarine

The wicked Blue Meanies take over Pepperland, eliminating all color and music. As the only survivor, the Lord Admiral escapes in the yellow submarine and journeys to Liverpool to enlist the help of the Beatles.

M・Y・F・A・C・E

Abstract horror short about a girl's face.

Thine Own Self

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

Enigma: Nazo

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.

Drizzle in Johnson

A scientist obsessively seeking the answers of the universe is thrust into a mind-bending odyssey of grotesqueries and genitalia.

On Generation and Corruption

Borrowing 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.

Wandaland

A mixed-media biography of a fictional animation tycoon.

Dead Times

What is man? Man makes war, man kills man, man hunts, man is executed. A montage mixing original drawings by Topor, original shots and stock shots that ironically analyze what man is.

Perspectrum

In this animated short, simple geometric forms as thin and flat as playing cards constantly form and re-form to the sound of the koto, a 13-stringed Japanese instrument.

Peach Melba

Two unusual people make contact in German at a London coffee house.

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Animated 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.

Monsieur Tête

Monsieur Tête, an ordinary bureaucrat, rebels against the world and the ideas of the people around him. Because of his marginal behavior, his head is broken, like everyone else.

Ah Pook Is Here.

A disturbingly organic-looking figure speaks to us of life, politics and death as the symbol of the common man toils away. Written and narrated by William S. Burroughs.

House

An experimental short film by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.

Atman

ĀTMAN is a visual tour-de-force based on the idea of the subject at the centre of the circle created by camera positions (480 such positions). Shooting frame-by-frame the filmmaker set up an increasingly rapid circular motion. ĀTMAN is an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction; the Japanese aspect is stressed by the devil mask of Hangan, from the Noh, and by using both Noh music and the general principle of acceleration often associated with Noh drama.

Shapes and Gestures

Begins as a whimsical piece with 'sheets' of lines running down the screen, progressing into more and more complex geometic patterns but without deviating from the basic precepts of 'dot and line' animation. Jazz piano on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and a spring color palette. -- Stephanie Sapienza. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2001.