Our annual survey of abstract and experimental animation. Animators working in this field employ every technique from hand-drawn ‘musical scores’ all the way across the scale to high definition, computer assisted image making. These 15 short films share a pure love of animated movement and an artist’s eye for filling the screen, harnessing colour and creating non-narrative imagery.
At Barbican book tickets
4:3 (Ross Hogg, UK)
Animated projections combine to develop a rhythmic dialogue exploring the intrinsic relationship between sound and image using 16mm film, paint and a projector.
2019, 5min
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Sonolumin (Diana Reichenbach, USA)
A stop-frame animated 360˚ exploration of the relationships between light, sound and space.
2018, 5min
Erodium Thunk (Winston Hacking, Canada)
Magazine cutouts, TV commercials and other mass-media detritus are stitched together, pulled apart, and recombined producing an unsettling Dadaist world.
2018, 3min
Under the Canopy (Bastien Dupriez, France)
Birds of paradise, displaying beautiful plumage, sing and dance in the tropical forests.
2019, 7min
+ (Max Hattler, Hong Kong/Germany/UK)
A symmetrical matrix of generative synthetic growth iterations of varying frequency intensities.
2019, 3min
Jim Zipper (Alexandre Roy, Canada/Switzerland)
A musical exploration inspired by various pictorial movements from the first half of the 20th century using the awesome pinscreen animation technique.
2018, 2min
Quiet (Sonja Rohleder, Germany)
Slowing down time, a journey through an ever-changing landscape of shapes in motion, with a sumptuous soundscape by Nils Frahm.
2019, 6min
Aperture (Emanuel Kabu, Italy)
The filmmaker connects with his roots as he walks the streets of his hometown in North East Italy.
2018, 2min
Pattern Cognition (Thorsten Fleisch, Germany)
When you stare at a screen for too long, the screen stares back at you.
2019, 7min
Catgot (Ho Tsz Wing, Hong Kong)
Water droplets, bubble smashes and rain dripping. The sound and image of a fountain.
2019, 3min
Matter and Motion (Max Hattler, Hong Kong/Germany)
Motion creation, energy transmission, kinetic combustion.
2018, 2min
Specimens Of Ephemeral Worlds (Rachel Wagner, USA)
A jarring immersion in fleeting worlds of dynamic sound and mystifying forms.
2018, 4min
VIVAldi VVinter (Theodore Ushev, Canada)
A dive into a snowstorm inspired by the ‘Winter’ section of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons.’
2018, 10min
Down Escalation (Shunsaku Hayashi, Japan)
Falling down, deep into the layers of itself, until the form is no more.
2018, 7min
The Dawn of Ape (Mirai Mizue, Japan)
The world’s first animation made to be watched by chimpanzees. For the first time ever, humans are allowed to look as well.
2019, 4min
