Chella Drive
2016 · 4m · United States
Directed by Adele Han Li
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A disembodied memory of adolescence in a Southern California suburb, drawn through projected animation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Han Li does the thing everyone expects from a nostalgia piece—soft focus, dreamy dissolves—except she's actually using projection and animation to *estrange* memory rather than romanticize it, which is the only move that matters.
The formal sophistication here is in the restraint: how projected animation inhabits the space between documentary and abstraction, positioning itself in a lineage that runs from experimental diary films through contemporary projected installation work, each frame considered as both image and object.
The decision to use projection as the delivery mechanism—not just as aesthetic but as *structure*—means the film exists differently in the room than on a screen, and that material choice transforms what could be a conventional memory piece into something that demands presence.