A film-poem created for Counterclock Journal's 2023 Patchwork: Film x Poetry fellowship, featuring an original poem by Mackenzie Duan and animation by Evan Bode.
Social & External
Narrator
This animated short is a visual representation of Goethe's poem, The ErlKing that uses sand-on-glass animation set to the music of Franz Schubert. The moving images, resembling woodcuts, capture the haunting, nightmarish quality of the tale of the ErlKing who steals and kills a little boy.
At the age of 9, I stopped speaking. It's the year I broke from the inside, raped. I came out as a trans boy years later. I am often afraid of becoming a man who I might confuse for the one who hounded my body. This film is a poem, this film is about growing into the unknown.
On the planet Gandahar where peace reigns and poverty is unknown, this utopian lifestyle is upset by reports of people at the outlying frontiers being turned to stone. Sylvain is sent to investigate this mysterious threat.
A young shepherdess and a chimneysweep plan to get married and escape the clutches of a tyrannical king in love with her, assisted by the guile of a cheeky mockingbird, the king's archenemy.
A spring night is a poetic film which is based on the motives of the poem by V. Lugovsky. The film is devoted to the theme of fidelity to the battle traditions of revolutionary past, to the theme of human happiness the sense of it in the battle for high ideals.
Poems by some of the greatest writers of all time are brought to life through lyrical animation and readings by some of today’s most respected performers.
In a lush and lively forest lives a hedgehog. He is at once admired, respected and envied by the other animals. However, Hedgehog’s unwavering devotion to his home annoys and mystifies a quartet of insatiable beasts: a cunning fox, an angry wolf, a gluttonous bear and a muddy boar. Together, the haughty brutes march off towards Hedgehog’s home to see just what is so precious about this “castle, shiny and huge.” What they find amazes them and sparks a tense and prickly standoff.
Rubén tries to describe the color blue as "The color of dreams, of art, of the ocean and of the firmament", thereby unleashing half a century of poetry.
Six poems written by six young prisoners animated to tell their stories, thoughts, fears and hopes.
In this farewell letter to Ana (aka Anorexia), I reveal the suffering associated with this illness. I express my desire to regain my freedom and vitality by sharing not only my progress but also my relapses. Through the interweaving of drawings and poetry, I share this quest for reconstruction, which I hope will help raise awareness of this mental illness and bring a little hope to people affected by it and those around them.
Pictures taken between France and Mexico running at 8 frames per second.
Tim Burton's original poem narrated by Christopher Lee.
Loose impressionistic brushstrokes sketch a series of portraits of two faces, one male and one female, while the verse on the soundtrack tells the tale of both one and a thousand relationships.
An animated telling of Kobe Bryant's titular poem, signaling his retirement from the sport that made his name.
An experimental visual poem combining film, animation, photography, and archival footage inviting people to occupy the Black Body and examine the lived Black experience for a brief moment.
A narrative poem brought to life and an ode to a grandfather's passing, NAMOO—which translates to “tree” in Korean—follows the journey of a budding artist from beginning to end.
This visual poetry is a celebration of the full spectrum of womanhood, from the complex vulnerability to the hidden power.
A cellist attempts to rescue a woman swept out to sea, only to find he must battle a series of overly possesive sea creatures.
In stop-motion animation, a wardrobe moves through the countryside. It arrives in a house, a child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," and various objects, such as toys and dolls, move about, disintegrate, and play out archetypal scenes. Like Carroll's verse, the images are at once familiar and unfamiliar. A child's play suit, hanging in the wardrobe, becomes the adventure's protagonist.
Short film to a song of love lost and rediscovered, a woman sees and undergoes surreal transformations. Her lover's face melts off, she dons a dress from the shadow of a bell and becomes a dandelion, ants crawl out of a hand and become Frenchmen riding bicycles. Not to mention the turtles with faces on their backs that collide to form a ballerina, or the bizarre baseball game.
Three sleepy babies in a clog-boat sailing through the night sky attempt to fish with candy canes for very smart fish.
Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.
Young Vincent Malloy dreams of being just like Vincent Price and loses himself in macabre daydreams that annoy his mother.
Created for Disney's 100th anniversary, the short features Mickey Mouse corralling a gallery of legendary Disney characters for a group photo.
Mickey has been reading Alice in Wonderland, and falls asleep. He finds himself on the other side of the mirror, where the furniture is alive.
Forcibly separated from her twin brother when they are orphaned, a melancholic misfit learns how to find confidence within herself amid the clutter of misfortunes and everyday life.
The people of Hamelin, overrun with rats, offer a bag of gold to anyone who can get rid of the rats. A piper offers to do the job, and successfully lures the rats into a mirage of cheese, which disappears. The citizens, disappointed that all he did was play a tune, offer only pocket change. The piper, angered, plays a new tune that has all the children of the city follow him, even the new twins the stork is preparing to deliver.
The Big Bad Wolf torments Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs.
A closeted boy runs the risk of being outed by his own heart after it pops out of his chest to chase down the boy of his dreams.
A group of dated appliances, finding themselves stranded in a summer home that their family had just sold, decide to seek out their eight year old 'master'.
In this anime visual album, a mysterious driver heads deep into a postapocalyptic hellscape toward a ferocious showdown with two monstrous opponents.
An inspirational speaker becomes reinvigorated after meeting a lively woman who shakes up his mundane existence.
An outcast duckling's search for a family to accept him leads to constant rejection before learning his true identity as a swan.
A gopher finds himself on a road where trucks are hauling produce to market. He hits on the idea of shaking some of the produce loose for himself, but other animals always beat him to the booty. That is, until a truck comes along with a cow...
Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche.
A jealous stump threatens two trees that are in love by starting a forest fire. When the rain comes and puts out the fire the forest revives and celebrates the wedding.
Wallace's whirlwind romance with the proprietor of the local wool shop puts his head in a spin, and Gromit is framed for sheep-rustling in a fiendish criminal plot.
A white dropout struggles to become a cartoonist and filmmaker, drawing inspiration from the harsh, gritty world around him. Still sharing his rundown apartment with his middle-aged parents, an oafish slob of an Italian father and a ditzy nutcase of a Jewish mother, he's ridiculed and looked down upon by his friends, hypocrites who run with violent gangs and the Italian Mafia, and a shallow Black girl who makes her living downtown with the pimps and pushers. The cartoonist gets a chance to pitch a film idea to a movie mogul, but the story proves too outrageous: a far-future Earth, depleted by war and pollution, where a mutant antihero challenges and kills God.
