Animation for Adults

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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Animation for Adults
  • An Island

    Directed by Ugo Bienvenu | 6 mins | 2012
    A discreet hole in the wall provides the middle-aged protagonist of this moodily inked, ennui-infused short with stolen views of the young woman next door.

  • 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 ...