Gemini
2025 · 7m · USA
Directed by Jamie Griffiths
Genres: animation, experimental, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: dark, humorous, surreal, whimsical
Sarah and her two cats go about their separate lives. The cats have strange dreams about their desires, and Sarah develops an unshakable paranoia that something is wrong with them. Sarah’s paranoia bleeds into her social life, and her two cats have their dreams come true.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
CalArts thesis about a woman's paranoia versus her cats' psychedelic dreamscapes, dialogue rendered as popping speech bubbles — that's a real formal choice and 916 views means it's flying under the radar where the weird stuff lives. Curious.
A CalArts thesis using graphic speech bubbles instead of voiceover and cutting between a paranoid woman and her cats' psychedelic dreams has real student-vanguard energy — the duality conceit structures the form properly. A small audience for a real artist, which is often the order of these things.
A CalArts thesis using popping graphic speech bubbles instead of voiceover, cutting between a woman's paranoia and her cats' psychedelic dreams — that structural device alone earns the experiment. Six minutes forty-one, modest 916 views, but the duality-as-form approach is exactly what thesis films should be doing.
Reviews
Wistful, float-y sensations with shapes, spirals, and a double cat who has a penchant for pranking its owner in a subtle manner. We all have a reflection.
Fully hand-drawn animations that blew me away with creativity and surrealism.
It appears to all be hand drawn, and the colored pencil backdrops add so much texture and life and contrast so well with the black and white characters.
Festivals
- Slamdance Film Festival 2025
- Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival 2024, Best Student Film
- San Francisco Transgender Film Festival 2024
- Bucheon International Animation Festival 2024
- Ann Arbor Film Festival 2024
- Mammoth Lakes Film Festival 2025, Best Animated Short
- Open World Animation Festival 2024
- Emberlight International Film Festival 2025
- Linoleum Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival 2025