In this short animation, the archetypal hero takes a journey through seven stages: birth, childhood, mission, labyrinth, monster, battle and death/rebirth. Through purely abstract, moving images, the corresponding emotional states are conveyed: calm, love, joy, surprise, fear, anger/hate, and death/rebirth leading again to calm. The cycles continue until the stars burn out and there is nothing left. Minotaur was created stereoscopically in IMAX® Sandde (Stereoscopic ANimation Drawing Device) , the world's first freehand stereoscopic 3D animation software.
Made in memory of Canadian artist and filmmaker Joyce June Wieland, June is a hand-drawn stereoscopic animation by NFB animator, Munro Ferguson. It is like a three-dimensional abstract painting that moves. June is Munro's attempt to capture what it was like for him to know Joyce. Part 1, "Alzheimer's", is about the end of her life. Part 2, "Memory", is about what she was like during the height of her creative powers.
The dinosaurs were headed for trouble. They ate nothing but junk food. They never brushed their teeth. They stayed up all night. And though they loved jumping off cliffs, they didn't like the landings much. The early mammals tried to warn them. "Keep that up and you'll all be extinct!" they said. But the dinosaurs just laughed... and over time, they evolved into birds.
Described (rather cheekily) by director Michael Snow as a musical comedy, this deft probing of sound/image relationships is one of his wittiest, most entertaining and philosophically stimulating films. In his words, the film “derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ element derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light-images of people.’”
