Forming Game
2008 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Malcolm Sutherland
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Hands open a box, unfold a board, and manipulate coloured shapes in a game with no winners or losers. Malcolm Sutherland's animated dance of forms celebrates how shapes unfold, scored with music by Ravi Shankar.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A game with no winners or losers is basically a middle finger to competition itself, which rules, but the film plays it too straight—all contemplative geometry and Ravi Shankar when it could've gone genuinely weird with the premise.
Sutherland positions this within a lineage of kinetic abstraction and playful formalism that traces back through structuralist animation, and the decision to wed mathematical unfolding to raag music creates a rigorous dialogue between visual and sonic systems that rewards close attention.
The crucial move is trusting the shapes themselves to generate rhythm and narrative—no character, no plot machinery, just hands and geometry and the specific weight of how each form settles into place, which is a decision that transforms five minutes of manipulation into something meditative.