AANAATT
2008 · 5m · Germany
Directed by Max Hattler
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
An abstract stop-motion work in which modernist geometric shapes move and construct themselves in almost organic ways across shifting, multi-layered surfaces, conjuring a strange world where familiar and unfamiliar experience is cut-up, upside-down and otherwise displaced.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Hattler's refusing to let digital tools do the heavy lifting is almost boring in its purity—except the film keeps genuinely disorienting you, which means the conceptual restraint actually *works*, and that's the kind of subversion I respect.
A rigorous sit-down with Constructivism and Surrealism that knows exactly where it's positioning itself in the lineage of experimental animation; the formal discipline of the static frame against the organic chaos of the geometry is precisely calibrated craft.
The decision to build spatial impossibility through mirrors and real light rather than render it is the whole film—it forces a tactile problem-solving that makes every frame feel handmade in a way that reads as almost sacred.
Reviews
A sublime stop-motion animation that hearkens back to 40's and 50's abstract films through its geneological exploration of shape and movement.