Cat's Cradle
1974 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Paul Driessen
Genres: animation, experimental, fantasy
Witches and cloaked riders move through a wordless Gothic fable about hunger and consequences in nature.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Driessen's doing the thing where animation becomes pure visual syntax—no dialogue, no plot scaffolding, just witches and riders in a space that feels both nowhere and everywhere. It's weirder than it has any right to be, which means it's probably exactly the thing everyone else is sleeping on.
This is animation operating at the level of formal argument: each frame a deliberate mark in conversation with a lineage stretching back through German Expressionism and medieval woodcut tradition. Driessen's restraint—the economy of line, the almost liturgical pacing—situates this among the serious architectural works of the medium.
The decision to strip narrative entirely and let the Gothic atmosphere live in pure movement and negative space is what makes this work; a lesser filmmaker drowns it in exposition or score, but Driessen trusts the audience to read hunger and consequence in the geometry of a cloaked figure alone.