Wax Experiments

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

July 1987 •English

The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.

Alarm

June 2009 •Korean

Snooze buttons, sunlight…the inescapable cacophony of alarm alerts: waking up in the morning is a battle between the present and the future state of mind. A dream-like war with yourself and other objects that seem to take a life of its own.

По дороге с облаками

December 1984 •Russian

Chatterbox

December 1980 •Russian

The Game

January 1962 •

In this child's game, a live-action boy and girl draw characters and compete who is better. The girl draws a flower and the boy draws a car that runs it over. Then a drawn lion chases a drawn girl, until it all becomes frightfully serious.

The Window

November 2012 •Korean

Sergeant Jeong Cheol-min's squad are in a renovated stock room with no window. The squad members are well known to be a hardworking group until Councellor Hong Yeong-soo comes in and starts causing trouble. Hong Yeong-soo seems to have difficulties adjusting to this environment. Things in the army changes rapidly, Jeong Cheol-min and his crew find themselves under attack perceived as the aggressors.

Planet Sigma

February 2015 •French

On planet Sigma, enormous creatures are trapped inside the ice. And then, all of a sudden explosions erupt from subterranean volcanoes. The ice begins to melt; a global warming concludes the giants’ deep slumber and new life begins. The creatures crawl forth, out of the ice.

1923

February 2010 •English

One of two animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage (1876-1954). Based on Lesage's painting A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World from 1923.

The Paintjackers

January 1959 •Russian

When the clock strikes twelve in a toy store a bunch of paint tubes come to life.

Polka Graph

January 1947 •English

Short film by Mary Ellen Bute

Metamorphic

January 1991 •Italian

It is well known that the disposition of the images drawn by Escher are neither for animation nor for pre-animation; actually, quite the opposite. His images appear to be the carrying out of metamorphic dissolves. A bird gives way to the recognition of a house, which turns into fish, which turns into birds, and so on. Not a single flapping of wings takes place; everything is reiterated and fixed, becoming immersed in and re-emerging from a static continuum. All of Escher is an homage to one of the major animating forces of the cinema: the cross-dissolve. Precisely there, I found cinematic attitudes: in the house which turns into fish and in everything that transforms into something else. I gradually managed to figure out various types of non-existent sequences and then finally found myself dissolved, crossing over metamorphically. —P.G.

Lyman H. Howe's Famous Ride on a Runaway Train

May 1921 •English

A runaway train speeds down the track.

Happy Go Luckies

November 1923 •English

In Happy-Go-Luckies a pair of ukulele-strumming railroad hoboes fake their way into a dog show and make off with the prize loot. “Two heads are better than one” is the moral. To modern eyes, our trickster duo may look like two dogs—in the show they pretend to be one long dog—but audiences of the ’20s would have recognized a dog-and-cat team. The black body, white face, and sharp ears would have been most familiar from the greatest jazz-era trickster cat, Felix. Dogs and cats—much easier to animate than humans—were everywhere in silent cartoons. Terry, like most early film animators, had begun as a newspaper cartoonist, and his first strip, working with his brother as a teenager for the San Francisco Call, was about the adventures of a dog named Alonzo.

Rhinoceros

February 1964 •German

Based on Eugene Ionesco’s play, this is an animated film warning that by conforming to patterns and living en masse, people will become rhinoceroses.

O Boto

November 2004 •Portuguese

Meditation

December 1971 •English

An abstract experimental short film from Jordan Belson.

Doing Their Bit

October 1942 •English

Nancy and Sluggo do their bit for the USO.

Caminandes: Llama Drama

February 2013 •English

Koro wants to get to the other side of the road.

Towards Eternity

September 2020 •English

An Eternalism film

Koko in Toyland

January 1925 •English

In this Christmas season release, Max assembles a toy train track while Ko-Ko the Clown visits a cartoon toyland, playing cops and robbers and rescuing a doll in distress.