Cityscape
1966 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Ryan Larkin
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
In Ryan Larkin's experimental animation, figures stream across the screen and vanish into a hole that eventually becomes a bridge topped by the young man they sprang from.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Larkin's doing something genuinely weird here—the crowd doesn't just move, it *funnels*, collapses into absence, then resurrects as architecture. It's the kind of premise that sounds pretentious until you watch figures dissolve into their own foundation, and suddenly you're unsettled in a way conventional narrative never bothers to be.
A rigorously composed meditation on the relationship between human form and urban space, *Cityscape* sits comfortably within the lineage of structural animation and the NFB's experimental canon—Larkin's economy of line and his treatment of negative space as active material shows a filmmaker deeply conscious of what animation can articulate that live action cannot.
The single choice that makes this work is treating the hole as a character rather than a void—it breathes, it receives, it transforms—and Larkin commits to that logic absolutely, letting one clean compositional decision sustain the entire mythic weight in just sixty seconds.