In this episodic animated fantasy from France, an art teacher interprets a series of six fairy tales (each involving a prince or princess) with the help of two precocious students. Princes and Princesses was created using a special style of cutout animation, with black silhouetted characters performing the action against backlit backdrops in striking colors.
Suicidal poet Archy tries to end his life by jumping off a bridge, but awakens to find he has assumed the life of a cockroach and has become a part of a community of creatures living in a newspaper office. He also discovers that he can still write poetry, using a typewriter, and begins to enjoy his new life. Archy develops deep feelings for the lovely but self-destructive cat Mehitabel, but will have to fight to win her from bad-boy tomcat Bill.
An experimental short film by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.
A nostalgia trip in the enigmatic labyrinth of the passed childhood.
Film shows the story of Papageno (the one from Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute"), who wants a mate, yet has difficulties getting one.
This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.
Two duelling birds get the urge to change their plumage. A blue jay wants to be decked out in the green of cedar, and a loon dons the burnished red of oak leaves, but neither bird foresees the consequences of vanity.
Wasteland is a five-part anthology film that deals with isolation, mental illness, and the subjectivity of reality. Each of the five parts can be watched individually, but when viewed in sequence, each story brings out a more interesting and distinct context to its respective pieces.
One of Klahr's masterpieces, Altair is an 8 minute collage color -noir culled from late-40s pages of Cosmopolitan, which induces a sense of claustrophobia and dread through its use of Stravinsky's The Firebird.
"The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully moulded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death – the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante’s Purgatorio, de Chirico’s stitched plain. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan." —Canyon Cinema
The protagonist dreams of a better life, and his dreams take the form of colorful magazines.
A small mole is looking for a fallen star in the night forest where everyone else seem to have already found their own treasures.
"After GYMNOPEDIES, I had long wanted to animate a film specifically for a pre-selected piano piece by [Erik] Satie. MOONLIGHT SONATA is that film. It was totally designed for the 'Gnossienne V' and the movements of the animation are timed to the overall rhythms as well as the specific beats of the music." - Lawrence Jordan
A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. A collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks death ... a parabolic parable.
The story of the evolution of life on Earth in animated form.
In a white lace universe, three inventors create machines which are both pretty and useful. Unfortunately people do not understand them...
A family pod of three dolphins navigates decay as an inevitable register while also having a secret ascension to a higher ground.
There is a hint of an under water circus, and many of the performers are acrobats. The sea water, if that's what it is, is yellowish brown. A full-faced sun rises from the Sun King's cradle, while a moon of Saturn circles the planet. The cut-out animation moves airily through a time-distorted world, where dizziness barely maintains a balance, and conventional time-sense disappears. The music of John Davis, which has been slowed to half speed, reverberates eerily throughout the pulsing series of performances, and one wonders whether in the next scene one can catch one's balance. The timing throughout is musical, and suggests a barely upheld world of sanity; of course the dream world creeps into the conscious mind's puritanical sense of propriety, rendering a secondary sense of unbalance facing trial at the bar of...whatever comes to mind. Delirium?
In the middle of the forest, a bonfire will define the fate of Fayna, a young, colorless girl.
Emerging from the sea onto land an axolotl swims through complex terrain parallel to a man searching for an encounter with God.