Rolling animated images of kaleidoscopic heads, skeletons and other absurdities. Abstact, surreal and darkly comic. This short was Run Wrake's (as J.M. Wrake) graduation film from The Royal College of Art, 1990
Rolling animated images of kaleidoscopic heads, skeletons and other absurdities. Abstact, surreal and darkly comic. This short was Run Wrake's (as J.M. Wrake) graduation film from The Royal College of Art, 1990
1990-05-05
8.5
In the final days of the year 1999, almost everyone in Taiwan has died from a strange plague that ravished the island. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him.
Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world's most advanced super computer.
When siblings Judy and Peter discover an enchanted board game that opens the door to a magical world, they unwittingly invite Alan -- an adult who's been trapped inside the game for 26 years -- into their living room. Alan's only hope for freedom is to finish the game, which proves risky as all three find themselves running from giant rhinoceroses, evil monkeys and other terrifying creatures.
Young hobbit Frodo Baggins, after inheriting a mysterious ring from his uncle Bilbo, must leave his home in order to keep it from falling into the hands of its evil creator. Along the way, a fellowship is formed to protect the ringbearer and make sure that the ring arrives at its final destination: Mt. Doom, the only place where it can be destroyed.
A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.
At an elite, old-fashioned boarding school in New England, a passionate English teacher inspires his students to rebel against convention and seize the potential of every day, courting the disdain of the stern headmaster.
A burger-loving hit man, his philosophical partner, a drug-addled gangster's moll and a washed-up boxer converge in this sprawling, comedic crime caper. Their adventures unfurl in three stories that ingeniously trip back and forth in time.
In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer; a train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.
The story of a super-secret spy organization that recruits an unrefined but promising street kid into the agency's ultra-competitive training program just as a global threat emerges from a twisted tech genius.
A graphic portrayal of the last twelve hours of Jesus of Nazareth's life.
A small suburban town receives a visit from a castaway unfinished science experiment named Edward.
A man with a low IQ has accomplished great things in his life and been present during significant historic events—in each case, far exceeding what anyone imagined he could do. But despite all he has achieved, his one true love eludes him.
The true story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian Brooklyn kid who is adopted by neighbourhood gangsters at an early age and climbs the ranks of a Mafia family under the guidance of Jimmy Conway.
World War II soldier-turned-U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by troubling visions and a mysterious doctor.
A young couple travels to a remote island to eat at an exclusive restaurant where the chef has prepared a lavish menu, with some shocking surprises.
Born under unusual circumstances, Benjamin Button springs into being as an elderly man in a New Orleans nursing home and ages in reverse. Twelve years after his birth, he meets Daisy, a child who flits in and out of his life as she grows up to be a dancer. Though he has all sorts of unusual adventures over the course of his life, it is his relationship with Daisy, and the hope that they will come together at the right time, that drives Benjamin forward.
When a deadly airborne virus threatens to wipe out the northeastern United States, teacher Elliot Moore and his wife Alma flee from contaminated cities into the countryside in a fight to discover the truth. Is it terrorism, the accidental release of some toxic military bio weapon -- or something even more sinister?
Two leading computer scientists work toward their goal of Technological Singularity, as a radical anti-technology organization fights to prevent them from creating a world where computers can transcend the abilities of the human brain.
Keller Dover is facing every parent’s worst nightmare. His six-year-old daughter, Anna, is missing, together with her young friend, Joy, and as minutes turn to hours, panic sets in. The only lead is a dilapidated RV that had earlier been parked on their street.
After a teenager has a terrifying vision of him and his friends dying in a plane crash, he prevents the accident only to have Death hunt them down, one by one.
An exploration of the relationship between sound and picture inspired by the two lights (twi-light) found inside film projectors.
A 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.
A 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.”
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.
Adams Film is a visual collage combining live action footage with abstract images and textures drawn onto 16mm film stock. Footage of a casual Janiak family gathering is sandwiched between superimposed garden scenes and rebellious direct animation. The soundtrack consists of assorted tape loops.
An abstract animation with a motif of a dragonfly, and a complex multi-exposure landscape of a field and a woman's naked body overlap.
Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.
Rhythm and repetition plays an important role in the animated film Allahu Akbar by Usama Alshaibi. With this film, Alshaibi questions the confrontation between tradition and modernity by drawing inspiration from geometric motives of Islamic art. The artist offers a re-interpretation of these motifs through computer animation. By turning the shapes in different direction, new images are generated, freeing them from their fixed state. Traditional spiritual values feed the present and open up to a modern perspective.
“[T]he sense of moving forward [in space or time] alternates with a sense of expansion and contraction, as the finished cycle [of movement] returns to itself and rushes to catch up with its successor.” (Gadassik) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.
An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.
Animation using cutout animation to craft a bizarre science fiction experiment. Moving spheres, such as balloons and bubbles, are superimposed on static backgrounds to suggest travel and discovery.
Early 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.
The film was produced applying mixed techniques on Super 8 film support.
Cut up animation and collage technique by Harry Smith synchronized to the jazz of Thelonious Monk's Mysterioso.
Two Space systematically explores symmetries used by Islamic artists to create abstract temple decorations. The two dimensional patterns, like the tile patterns of Islamic temples, are generated by performing a set of symmetry operations (translations, rotations, and reflections) upon a basic figure or tile. Two Space consists of twelve such patterns produced using each of nine different animating figures (12 x 9 = 108 total). Rendered in stark black and white, the patterns produce optical illusions of figure-ground reversal and afterimages of color. Gamelan music from the classical tradition of Java adds to the mesmerizing effect.
The mutating forms of Tensai Banpaku, or “Genius Expo” create a stunning abstract orchestra.
Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.
Although only a couple of minutes long, this animated short makes the point that oxygen is the stuff of life whether on land, in the air or water, but that it is becoming scarcer as man-made pollutants crowd it out. This is a film without words in which plants, birds, fish and, finally, man come to the same "breathless" end