Alan the Infinite
2020 · 10m · UK
Directed by Dan Ojari, Mikey Please
Genres: adventure, animation, comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, humorous, whimsical
On his first day interning at a lamination company called Lamin'8, nervous young Alan accidentally unleashes an unstable cosmic particle from a lab, triggering unpredictable transformations throughout the office and complicating his budding crush on fellow newbie Prea.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Stop-motion carved entirely from wood at a lamination company called Lamin'8. Mikey Please's wood-puppet thing is the most genuinely strange craft choice in modern animation — I'm always in for that.
Please and Ojari fabricating an entire office from carved wood with 2D faces layered on — they are the most disciplined British stop-motion practitioners of their generation, and Robin Robin earned them every comparison. The premise is slight; the craft is not.
Mikey Please carved the entire stop-motion film from wood with digitally-layered 2D faces — his signature unconventional-material approach in service of an office-comedy-meets-cosmic-particle premise. 10 minutes from Parabella; the texture commitment is the whole appeal.
Reviews
A Cosmic Dark Comedy That Begs to Become a Series — it establishes appealing characters within an expertly designed world.
The excellent production design and smooth motion of the animation, paired with digitally added 2D facial expressions, quickly cause you to ignore the medium of creation.