In this episodic animated fantasy from France, an art teacher interprets a series of six fairy tales (each involving a prince or princess) with the help of two precocious students. Princes and Princesses was created using a special style of cutout animation, with black silhouetted characters performing the action against backlit backdrops in striking colors.
As winter gives way to spring in the Russian wilderness, a crafty fox promptly expels a defenceless hare from his warm, comfortable residence, claiming the house for himself and leaving the poor owner to sleep outside under the stars. An assortment of compassionate animals – a wolf, a bear, a bull – take pity on the disheartened hare, and attempt to evict the cunning fox, but to no avail. Along comes a hilariously militant rooster, proud and tenacious, who marches into the hare's house and doesn't give up until the fox has been hounded back into the wilderness.
In a white lace universe, three inventors create machines which are both pretty and useful. Unfortunately people do not understand them...
We hear the distant ring of Saturn.
An experimental short film by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.
Suicidal poet Archy tries to end his life by jumping off a bridge, but awakens to find he has assumed the life of a cockroach and has become a part of a community of creatures living in a newspaper office. He also discovers that he can still write poetry, using a typewriter, and begins to enjoy his new life. Archy develops deep feelings for the lovely but self-destructive cat Mehitabel, but will have to fight to win her from bad-boy tomcat Bill.
An animated adaptation of Poe's famous short story.
Film shows the story of Papageno (the one from Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute"), who wants a mate, yet has difficulties getting one.
A comical animated opera. A chicken leaves to get birch branches for sauna while the rooster stays to warm the sauna. On her way she sees a clear-watered well, a tired cow and other creatures that sing along "Finland's best animal actress" Elina Salo and a child choir to some songs composed by M.A. Numminen.
A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. A collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks death ... a parabolic parable.
Three artists struggling against the grid of society find spiritual renewal.
A family pod of three dolphins navigates decay as an inevitable register while also having a secret ascension to a higher ground.
The flower fairies help a little girl named Mary to thwart germs.
ALEXANDER THE GRAPE, an unfinished cut-paper animated short from Jim Henson from 1965, relates the fable of a young grape with big ambitions who learns that it is better to accept yourself than to try to be something you are not. The short was reconstructed from film and audio elements; images from Jim’s storyboard fill in missing segments of the animation.
Animation using cutout animation to craft a bizarre science fiction experiment. Moving spheres, such as balloons and bubbles, are superimposed on static backgrounds to suggest travel and discovery.
The story of the evolution of life on Earth in animated form.
"The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully moulded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death – the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante’s Purgatorio, de Chirico’s stitched plain. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan." —Canyon Cinema
A short surreal animation created with fashion magazine clippings and sound collages.
A little boy has a tiger as a pet, but it's a secret. The widemouth of the apartment building is Miss Kotilainen, who is always complaining about everything. Other people in the building have their own secrets too. After a lot of those secrets are uncovered, a party is held that melts the heart of Miss Kotilainen. After that, Kalle the Tiger won't have to be hidden no more.
A silhouette animation anthology TV series conceived, written and directed by Michel Ocelot and realised at La Fabrique, consisting of short fantastical stories performed by the same animated "actors." A critical success but commercial failure at the time, no further episodes were commissioned beyond the initial 8, but, following the success of Ocelot's Kirikou and the Sorceress, 6 were edited into the 2000 feature Princes and Princesses, in which form they finally saw wide exposure and acclaim both in France and internationally; a further episode was included in a home release of short works in 2008, but one remains unavailable for public consumption.
A children's animation series that is centred around Bertie the bat and his friends who all live in the sky and try to keep it clean and pollution free.
Elle and her son Rowan are on the run. Is this twisted mother and son relationship a bizarre case of extreme Munchausen syndrome by proxy? Or is Rowan a dangerous supernatural creature?
