Hunger
1974 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Peter Foldès
Genres: animation, drama, experimental
Tones: dark, darkly comic, provocative, surreal
A wordless morality tale in which a man's appetite grows into all-consuming gluttony, his body swelling grotesquely — one of the first computer-animated films ever made, and the first nominated for an Oscar.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
In 1974 a computer helped Peter Foldès draw a man eating himself into a monster — the morphing imagery is still more disturbing than anything produced by a billion-dollar render farm today.
Foldès' 1974 morphing computer animation is a Sphinx of a film — the first Oscar-nominated CGI short, predating everything we now take for granted. The morality is thuddingly literal, but the formal innovation is unimpeachable cinema history.
One of the first computer-animated films ever made AND first computer-animated Oscar nominee — Foldès in 1974 staging gluttony as wordless body horror. Eleven minutes of legitimately important medium history.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 1974, Special Jury Award for Short Films
- BAFTA 1975, Best Short Animation
- Academy Awards 1975