Peter Sluszka

Food and felonies are inseparable in Hardboiled, a stop-motion animated satire of the classic urban American crime drama.

Food and felonies are inseparable in Hardboiled, a stop-motion animated satire of the classic urban American crime drama.

Food and felonies are inseparable in Hardboiled, a stop-motion animated satire of the classic urban American crime drama.

Max and Maxine is a story about a grandfather and granddaughter, and the life-giving power of imagination. Following the surreal adventures of two lovable characters—Max and Maxine—Hornet Director Peter Sluszka creates a dreamscape world that’s bursting with imaginative life. It’s a world immersed in both metaphor and mixed media mastery. Imagination, and it’s ability to provide motivation for living and childlike wonder even in the face of terminal cancer, is the thematic thread. But it’s the technique—an irresistible implementation of stop motion using only custom-made puppets and materials—which transforms the story from simple and sweet to completely enthralling.

Here Come The Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized" is an animated collaboration between the band and four filmmakers: Guilherme Marcondes, Julia Pott, Peter Sluszka and Santa Maria. The Los Angeles Times describes it as "a tumbling series of visuals with four distinct aesthetic styles. Peter Sluszka's ultra-slow motion capture of exploding mushrooms and elegantly disseminating seed pods … Julia Pott's line art of wolves and foxes hovering in geometric constellations … Guilherme Marcondes' renderings of skeletons caught among leafless branches and verdant human arms that unfurl like ferns… Santa Maria provides context…with cosmic, computer-generated vistas, cartoons of splintering bones.

A dream transmits across the galaxy, eliciting a mysterious response that collapses the distance between deep space, a young girl's imagination, the dead, and the living.