Introduction to Figures in Focus: The Magical World

Everyone who loves the art of animation knows that there is some sorcery in its making, conjuring up impossible worlds from one’s imagination onto the screen. Having spent the last few years working on an animation with artist Elizabeth Hobbs, based on The Debutante, a wicked, short story by artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2111), Leonora’s formidable art has been foremost in my mind. Particularly, the ethereal, surreal, and other worldly places that she conjures from her imagination and that permeate her stories and her artwork. In putting together this programme I imagined what contemporary films Leonora might respond to and be excited by. Works that are spirited, feminist, symbolic, and those appreciative of nature and animals, which Leonora had deep affection for.  

There is a surreal, natural order in Allison Schulnik’s hallucinatory short Eager. On discussing her practice Schulnik said: “I like to blend earthly fact and blatant fiction to form a stage of tragedy, farce, and raw, ominous beauty – at times capturing otherworld buffoonery, and other times presenting a simple earthly dignified moment.” In Eager, delicate, painterly, clay creatures participate in a ritualistic dance that conjures a priestess, a spirit of the forest, who catalyses their transformation. They coalesce with one another, consume one another, as the cycle of life plays out. We move from darkness to a verdant clay forest where the plants are vibrant and deadly at the same time. This world is then fused with real world environments, real plants, a real priestess – the dream penetrating into our reality. Everything in the film is fluid, organic, everything desires to live, everything dies and returns to nature and is born again.  

With The Linguists, Anna Bunting-Branch invites us into an alternative, female centred world. It is as if we are being ushered into a séance to see the workings of a coven, a community of curious women expressing themselves with a new mode of discourse. “We want to speak, but there are many words we don’t have. We want to speak, but we can’t.” Anna shares with us the language of Láadan, both spoken and presented on a computer screen. (Láadan was a ‘women’s language’ constructed in the 1980s by science fiction writer Suzette Haden Elgin.) The words that we both read and hear speak of love, kindness, touch, creativity, and fertility. There are feminine, yonic, sexual motifs throughout the narrative – lips, flowers, tongues, fingers, blood. A disembodied, naked statue of a female form is reclaimed from art history, and it too is given a voice through lipstick kisses – it refuses to be silent.

In Impossible Figures and Other Stories II by Marta Pajek the domestic space is a living, breathing, ever shifting, moveable thing. The woman’s house becomes a chaotic dreamspace that defies logic. In the kitchen, she frustratedly tries to stop the fragile chicken’s eggs falling and breaking off a strangely sloping table. In her mutating corridor, the wallpaper pattern shifts from monochromatic and geometric to women’s faces – hushed, silenced, hiding – transforming to veins to bright red, erotic, vulvic flowers that bloom from the walls. In her bedroom, the memories of past lovers materialise in bodily form from her closet to be forced back in. Flowers wither on the walls, the space shifts, seductive new flowers bloom then turn to tall grasses that envelope her. She finds herself in a dancehall where the couples slow dance morphing into one body as they smooch. The men grip onto their female partners with force. The house shifts and melts into the ground. She now finds herself alone with an egg that hatches and reveals a surprising creature. The woman looks to us, she smiles. She is back in control.

Alisi Telengut has crafted a lushly textured moving painting to accompany the Mongolian nomadic tale told by Qirima, Alisi’s grandmother in Tears of Inge. Much like Eager, we are plunged into darkness at the start. The blackness of night gives way to a colourful natural world where the sun and moon dominate the sky and a baby camel appears to be sent down from the firmament to its mother’s womb. After delivery, the camel mother is empty inside, a blackness residing within her. Alisi shares a touching picture of the relationship between the camel mother and the nomad who sings to the camel and heals her from her pain so that she may accept her calf again. An expressionistic piece with its dramatic skies, it is as though the whole world feels the emotions of the camel in the thick brush strokes captured by Alisi under the camera. At the end we return again to the darkness.

Kamakura is formed from Yoriko Mizushiri’s memories of the soft, white snow of her hometown. A film of sensual visuals and soothing sounds that combined produces a work both calming and unsettling simultaneously. With a palette of pastel colours, it could be described as a ‘feminine film’, (as could many of the films in this programme), where the softness and delicacy underpins something more formidable at its core. This is an uncanny space we find ourselves in, faced with a faceless shape that we read as a body: disembodied legs, a form sinking into water, a detached mouth, and a needle piercing yielding flesh. It’s compelling and visceral and comforting and nightmarish all at once as we seek to find our meaning in Yoriko’s symbolic work.

The angriest of all the films in the programme is surely Hell Hath No Furie by Kitty Faingold. With its bold, red and black aesthetic, and strong graphic styling, the fury is woven into the look as much as the narrative. Kitty invites us into a seemingly ordinary apartment filled with kitsch, spirited, knick-knacks and dull nature shows playing on the old television set. We witness the Furies (goddesses of vengeance), now resurrected as women living in the 1990s, coming together to play a game of cards rather crossly. The animated cards are somewhat reminiscent of Leonora Carrington’s enthralment with the iconography of tarot. We meet Allecto (‘Unceasing in Anger’), Tisiphone (the ‘Vengeful One’) and Megaera (the ‘Green Eyed Monster’) trying as best as they can to get along, though they cannot help but descend into a feud of apocalyptic proportions. If only they had a language in which to better express themselves as The Linguists do.   

In LOVE, Réka Bucsi considers the moods associated with love on a macro scale. Like a goddess she has forged an entire solar system that is materially affected by feelings of longing, loving, loss and loneliness. Réka said: “I approached the atmosphere by using different sensations and impressions of material, movement, and colour, but no words… I wanted the film to become something that the viewer would like to touch and be part of.” Réka’s celestial bodies are presented as living entities whose changing emotions affect the flora and fauna in their ecosystems. Once sparse environments become lush, the inhabiting creatures bond with newly discovered mates, and the planets grow bigger and more verdant as they thrive on the connections. Much like the natural world in Eager, the impermeance of life is revealed as the cycle shifts, the worlds evolve, and every living thing has been seemingly touched and changed by the experience of love as the end credits roll.

An enchanting life cycle is presented on screen in Amandine Meyer’s Histoire pour 2 Trompettes. It begins with a cracked statue of a girl and a boy bursting open with a flood of water, which transforms into the tears streaming down a girl’s face. Everything is fluid in the film, enhanced by the exquisite watercolour backgrounds. A baby becomes a child, the child becomes a girl, and the girl births a host of infant water sprites. They turn ugly and weedy and wanting. The girl’s head becomes a breast, and her spurting milk nurtures the sprites and produces a splendid underwater realm. The girl has become the creator and crafts a new and improved fountain for herself; and with it has forged her own creative freedom. Amandine said: “Fifteen years ago in my fanzine ‘Pique-nique’ a little girl with a breast head appeared. She embodied the fear of becoming a mother with the transformation of the erotic body into a nourishing body. The unwillingness to dress up as a mother by wearing the breast as a mask, as if one were disappearing before this new status.” Much like the soft violence in Kamakura, Amandine has brought to life a disquieting children’s picture book inspired by her own experiences.

In Renee Zhan’s O Black Hole!, a woman’s anxiety about loss and loneliness leads her to consume everyone and everything she loves so that she can never feel abandoned. As with Eager, LOVE and Tears of Inge, we are presented with the all-consuming darkness of the universe, only this universe is internal. Renee renders the real, transient world in thick oil paints, pencil, watercolour and charcoal, and the inner, inescapable jail in solid 3D models. Our heroine, Singularity, is an abnormality in the black hole. Her translucency is much like the spirits to be found in Leonora’s paintings. In this operatic odyssey, Singularity encounters prisoners who aid her on her journey – planets, seasons, the moon – as she ascends to challenge her captor. The waxy, ghostly people she meets seem to be stuck in repetitive loops as though trapped in endlessly replayed memories. Akin to the expressive styling of Tears of Inge, Renee uses oil paint to enhance the emotion and drama of the climactic scene where the Singularity confronts the Black Hole.

The natural world is foremost in this collection of fantastical films – they consider its cycles, the ways in which it influences our lives, and how to become attune with it. They speak to the impermeance and fragility of life and of memory, the darkness and light of being human, and of expressing emotions without words or with new ways of speaking. Invented and populated by goddesses, witches, and priestesses, these are truly magical worlds presented on screen.

Figures in Focus, (previously called Female Figures) was devised in 2017 by Abigail Addison in recognition of the under-representation of female and non-binary animators and their stories within the independent animation sector. The programme spotlights some of the incredible work crafted by contemporary animators, both in the UK and internationally.

With thanks to Réka Bucsi, Renee Zhan, Anna Bunting-Branch, Carmen Hannibal, Elizabeth Hobbs, Nag Vladermersky, Waltraud Grausgruber, Kate Anderson, Samantha Moore, Ellie Land, Jessica Ashman, and all the featured filmmakers, their producers, and distributors.

Image: Impossible Figures and Other Stories II by Marta Pajek