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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The Siren
Directed by Sepideh Farsi | 100 mins | 2023
Crisply animated in a vivid, minimalistic 2D style, Farsi’s "The Siren" shows us the opening salvos of the devastating 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and their terrible human toll, in telling the tale of 14-year-old Omid. As hostile forces threaten to encircle ... -
Millenium Actress
Directed by Satoshi Kon | 86 mins | 2001
"Perfect Blue" director Kon continues to explore the myth-making process and the deceptions and confusions that go into the formation of a star persona in the brilliant, boundary-blurring "Millennium Actress". Begun in monochrome that slowly saturates with... -
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 ... -
Skhizein
Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 13 mins | 2008
“I am exactly 91cm from myself,” frets Henry, the central figure in this Annecy-and Cannes-awarded account of a life uncentered. After being struck by a meteorite, Henry finds that he must negotiate to the material world—sitting in a chair, opening a win... -
Palmipedarium
Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 10 mins | 2012
Clapin followed up his acclaimed short "Skhizein" (2008) with this wordless and unsettlingly ambiguous fable about a boy who encounters a scraggly avian creature while duck hunting with his father. It’s a short whose placid surfaces belie a latent, buddi... -
Backbone Tale
Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 9 mins | 2004
Clapin’s first short is a game of Tetris as much as it is a love story. It centers on a man whose spine bends at a striking right angle: his eyes can gaze only downwards, his hat perched on the back of his head. The appearance of a woman whose back bends ... -
I Married a Strange Person!
Directed by Bill Plympton | 72 mins | 1997
Newlywed Kerry becomes suspicious of her husband, Grant, when he starts manifesting signs of what seem to be superpowers in Plympton’s surreal film of shape-shifters, unusual sexual couplings, and covetous conglomerates.“Probably the socket and most t...
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Cheatin'
Directed by Bill Plympton | 77 mins | 2013
A lurid film noir opera that eschews intelligible dialogue, "Cheatin’" follows a couple, Jake and Ella, from the first blush of attraction at a carnival meet-cute to the cusp of marital disintegration.“My second non-dialogue film and I believe it's my...
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Push Comes to Shove
Directed by Bill Plympton | 6 mins | 1991
With its pair of mute, suited protagonists trading increasingly elaborate blows, Bill Plympton’s Cannes Jury Prize-awarded short evokes the surrealist bodily harm of Jan Svankmajer’s "The Dimensions of Dialogue" (1982). -
Footprints
Directed by Bill Plympton | 4 mins | 2014
When a man’s rest is disrupted by the sound of glass shattering at his front door, he grabs his hat and gun and sets off in mad pursuit of the culprit. After traversing land and sea, he is unprepared for what he discovers. -
Santa the Facist Years
Directed by Bill Plympton | 4 mins | 2008
Doe-eyed elves manufacture weaponry and snowmen goose-step into Lapland by order of a radicalized Santa in this twisted miniature fantasia, narrated by Matthew Modine.