Where is the farthest you have traveled? What did you find there? Did you return home the same person? Though each approach is different, this year’s animated films all search for meaning in a complex world. Some find the meaning they seek, others realize meaning wasn’t needed after all.
We open and close with journeys to haunted mountains in Asia; A Poem in Bamboo brings us to a mansion in China with a secret locked in its attic, while The Haunted Swordsman seeks revenge on a demon in Japan. Fresh Green and MEDIUM RARE contemplate events closer to home, but no less mysterious for their surface familiarity. In A Sequence of Events and Tulipomania: (This Gilded Age) So What Are You Looking At?, we contemplate repetition and expectation. Obscurer and Crowded retreat even farther from the neighborhood and public spaces to focus on bedrooms, private spaces, and the mids that inhabit them. That Makes Two of Us confronts itself and does not like what it finds. Re-Education of the Senses challenges viewers to let go of our preconceptions and reprogram ourselves.
Mediums include: hand drawn, stop motion, cut paper, computer animation, and puppetry.
Featuring:

A Poem in Bamboo
Xufei Wu, Chun Yao Chang, USA, 5 min.
In 1920s China, a young man visits his aunt’s mansion in the mountains.

A Sequence of Events
Michael Edwards, USA, 6 min.
Things move and one thing leads to another, sort of.

Fresh Green
Ida Greenberg, USA, 4 min.
Mysteries live beneath the floor of the pool hall.

Obscurer
Kiera Faber, USA, 19 min.
An abstract narrative of isolation, mental illness, and loss.

Crowded
Nathania Rubin, USA, 6 min.
How does anyone retain their identity through internal and external changes?

Re-Education of the Senses
Erinn E. Hagerty & Adam Savje, USA, 12 min.
An experimental vision of Bauhausian hypnotherapy orchestrated by sentient technology.

MEDIUM RARE
Luca Cioci, USA, 5 min.
Functional and aesthetic values in recurrent, yet questionable domestic scenarios.

Tulipomania: (This Gilded Age) So What Are You Looking At?
Cheryl Gelover, Tom Murray, USA, 3 min.
Hazy figures and shifting surfaces question the motives of the narrator.

That Makes Two of Us
Tim Hawkins, UK, 5 min.
An aging aristocrat vomits up his own doppelganger and repeats an unending cycle.

The Haunted Swordsman
Kevin McTurk, USA, 16 min.
A lone samurai and his odd companion, a cursed severed head, seek vengeance in a haunted world.