Nocturna Artificialia (1979)
Genre : Animation
Runtime : 21M
Director : Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay
Synopsis
Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.
Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.
The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.
Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.
In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.
A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.
Clever and mildly entertaining short from Plympton shows us the point of view of a tree throughout its life. The film gives us various vignettes dealing mostly with sex and violence.
The aristocratic White Mice and the rustic Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak battle over the doll of their heart's desire.
In an attic full of discarded junk, a pretty doll called Buttercup lives in an old trunk together with her friends, the marionette Prince Charming, lazy Teddy Bear and the plasticine creature Schubert. When Buttercup is snatched and taken off to the Land of Evil, her pals set out to rescue her.
Stop-motion animated short film with a white ball, a rabbit, and a girl, and a voice singing "Are We Still Married".
While an opera singers sings in a snowy and cold street, we are allowed to witness a meeting between a man and a woman through blowing net curtains. The music is touched by sadness and the emotions of the characters are no different. Nearer they become while the singer sinks deeper into the melancholy.
One night Alice can't stand her husband anymore and she decides to leave him. It's a dark, rainy night and something smashes the windshield so Alice is forced to seek shelter in an old mansion. She is warmly welcomed but soon realises that strange things are happening. She tries to escape but it seems there's no way out.
Trnka’s sci-fi vision of the future in which machines and robots try to substitute themselves into the most beautiful human relationships. A cybernetic robot is supposed to substitute for the loving grandmother of a little girl. The wise grandmother, however, comes back and the girl finds the warmth of her grandmother’s loving arms again. Trnka’s artistic ideas in this film can be described as both poetically fragile and dramatically cautionary.
Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.
Short animated film featuring the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You" by His Name Is Alive.
Laid-off old mannequins spend their cracked and broken lives in an old, abandoned warehouse. New mannequins are brought to the warehouse. They are old as well, but from a younger generation. The two groups must live together, but it's not easy at all.
The first puppet kinescope in the world. It is based on the famous poetic comedy by William Shakespeare. Three worlds meet in this story: the noble world of three Athens couples, a common popular world of tradesmen amateur theatre and a fairy-tale happiness of magic creatures as elves and nymphs. The film is considered the most remarkable Jirí Trnka's work and a milestone in the history of the world animation.
Romance sentimentale is a 1930 French film directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei M. Eisenstein. A short, experimental, slightly poetic montage of city and abstract images.
A dreamy film in which two women are transported from a beach in France to New York City. Separated and lost, they frantically search for one another.
The story, a Communist re-telling of Gulliver's Travels, is about a young boy who dreams of himself as a version of Gulliver who has landed in Lilliput suffering under capitalist inequality and exploitation.
A boy grows a seed into a flower while the world around him marches on.