America, I Think?
2017 · 1m · UK
Directed by Matthew Armitage
Genres: animation, experimental
A one-minute experimental animation assembled from memories of a visit to Orlando, Florida, mapping the characters and iconography of a theme-park city into a deliberately chaotic visual landscape.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Sixty-one seconds of compressed cultural anxiety — Armitage gets at something true about tourist memory by refusing accuracy entirely. The chaos isn't a limitation, it's the argument.
One minute, Orlando memory, deliberately wrong American iconography. The format protects it from overstaying — and the conceit is sharper than the Plympton/Hertzfeldt comp suggests.
Matthew Armitage rebuilds Orlando entirely from tourist memory — a deliberately wrong image of American iconography, and the wrongness is the whole formal idea. London Short Film Fest knew.