Retro dreams in retro animation

My life has recently been revolving around animation, as I’ve been working on a little animated intro for my website and finishing an old project, which is an animated music clip to Fly on the Windscreen by Depeche Mode. The latter involved getting deep into expressions, which, as every After Effects adept knows, is not an easy territory. But after months of work, I am beginning to see the light at the end of a tunnel.

All this work coincided with a few animation-related things. A few weeks ago I went to Docs Against Gravity festival, where I saw two films which incorporated animation in interesting ways: Dreams Rewired and The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda), the latter being more of an art installation than a documentary, with an emphasis on visuals and mood rather than a narrative. Secondly, there was a film/puppetry exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle called Objects Do Things which had quite striking marketing materials and spooky animated trailers created by Noviki Studio. Last week, the internet was mourning the passing away of Studio Ghibli pioneer Makiko Futaki, who was behind masterpieces such as Akira and Princess Mononoke, and a few days later, Google commemorated Lotte Reiniger’s would-be 117^th birthday with a fantastic Google Doodle (bravo to Olivia Huynh!). Plus I stumbled on a few random things whilst researching stuff on the internet (as you do).

I am not going to talk about everything though, for I want to focus on the kind of animation I am most interested in: collage / mixed, hand-cut and stop motion animation. And everything retro.

All of which can be found in Dreams Rewired.

Directed by Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart, and Thomas Tode, and narrated by Tilda Swinton, Dreams Rewired is an essay on technological utopias, which questions our post-modern all-time connectivity. Created using footage from 1880s to the 1930s, it reminds us of the excitement, hopes and dreams surrounding early technological inventions such as the telephone, television and cinema. Visually stunning, it does however seem to fall into the “style over substance” trap, and I agree with Christopher Gray from Slant Magazine, who says that the film’s “promises of