Animation for Adults
A selection drawn from the rich and varied history of animation, with an eye to works for general audiences that push their stories and design into bravura realms. This month’s spotlight falls upon two feature-length films by Marcell Jankovics—a purveyor of trippily colorful folk tales who was Hungary’s best-known animator.
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Voyage chromatique
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 4 mins | 2011
With its pack of flexing, thrusting figures, cold and white as if carved of marble, some handless or footless but still animated by amorous intentions, this transfixing, techno-set short evokes the surrealist imagery of Giorgio de Chirico. -
Dolly.Zero
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu | 4 mins | 2017
A retrofuturist tale of doomed lovers on a loop, illustrated in the spirit of seminal French comics magazine "Métal Hurlant" and set to a propulsively plaintive synth groove. -
Maman
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 5 mins | 2013
An unsettling portrait of domestic anomie, in which communication between family members has broken down. What remains is the persistent whistling of a pot, an iron thumped against the wall, and the matriarch’s wordless, raspy scream. -
Rocks in My Pockets
Directed by Signe Baumane | 89 mins | 2014
Armed with a surrealist sensibility and a wicked sense of humor, New York-based Latvian animator Signe Baumane has long probed the thorny parts of life as a woman. Here, hand-drawn imagery combines with papier-mache sets and stop-motion techniques in an ...