Fruit
2016 · 7m · Germany
Directed by Gerhard Funk
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
An abstract animated creation story in which vibrating black and white entities are continuously split apart and reconciled by red, choreographing a wordless dialogue between two mythological forces — East and West.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would call this 'just shapes moving around,' which is exactly why it works—Funk strips away every narrative crutch and still conjures genuine mythic tension with nothing but color, rhythm, and the friction between abstraction and meaning.
This is rigorous formalist cinema operating in the lineage of Oswald and early Kandinsky, where the editing tempo and chromatic relationships do the work of traditional narrative—a film that understands abstraction as a discipline, not an escape.
The choice to use red not as a character but as a *verb*—the force that splits and reconciles the black and white—is the entire film, and it's the kind of structural gambit that makes you rethink what animation can do with almost nothing.
Festivals
- Thessaloniki Animation Festival 2016, 1st Prize
- KinstOOn Festival 2016, 1st Prize
- ReAnimania International Animation Film Festival 2016, Prize
- Taos Shortz Film Festival 2016, Best Animation
- Snowtown Film Festival 2016, Outstanding Animated Film
- FILUMS 2016, Best Concept for Animation
- Tehran International Short Film Festival 2016, Special Mention
- Animfest Athens 2016, Special Mention
- Hiroshima International Animation Festival 2016
- KROK International Animated Films Festival 2016
- Interfilm Berlin 2016
- Encounters Film Festival 2016
- Anifilm Trebon 2016
- OFF Odense International Film Festival 2016