Cyclone Forever
2013 · 4m · USA
Directed by Faiyaz Jafri
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
Coney Island's archetypical characters ride the Cyclone roller coaster on an endless loop, enduring time and tide in a stylized, dreamlike eternity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Jafri takes the Cyclone—America's most reassuring pleasure machine—and turns it into a Sisyphean nightmare, which is clever enough, but the hyper-stylized 3D execution feels more like confident craft than subversion; I wanted the premise to disturb me more than it does.
The film sits firmly in a lineage of cyclical-time meditations and mythic animation—Tarsem Singh's visual excess, maybe some early Bill Plympton—but Jafri's decision to render Coney Island's carousel as literal purgatory with pop-culture bodies shows real formal intelligence about how style encodes meaning.
The choice to loop the same archetypal riders infinitely through 3D space is the film's entire argument, and it lands because Jafri commits fully to the geometric precision of the coaster's track as a frame for time itself—every repetition tightens, not loosens, the emotional grip.
Festivals
- Coney Island Film Festival 2013
- Animation Block Party 2013