In a Nutshell
2017 · 6m · Switzerland
Directed by Fabio Friedli
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
A kinetic stop-motion montage of roughly 3,000 hand-crafted images that compresses the arc of human existence — from primordial seed to war, love, indifference and apocalypse — into under six minutes, looping back where it began.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
This is the kind of film that could've been insufferable—Big Statement About Life in six minutes—but Friedli pulls off something genuinely strange by letting the looping structure do the philosophical work instead of spelling it out, which is where most experimentalists fail.
The formal lineage here traces back through Brakhage and the structuralist animators, and Friedli honors that tradition while asserting his own hand: 3,000 discrete images that accumulate into something like a contemporary memento mori, executed with the rigor of classical animation.
The decision to end each cycle in a microchip that becomes a seed again is small but lethal—it's the hinge that transforms what could've been a pretty montage into a closed-loop statement about technology and recurrence, and it's done with almost no dialogue or score, just image after image making the argument.
Reviews
A staggeringly inventive attempt to encompass the world 'from a seed to war, from meat to love, from indifference to apocalypse'.
A dazzling stop-motion montage that takes us through the wonder and disillusionment of human existence.
Festivals
- Berlin International Film Festival 2017
- Aspen Shortsfest 2017, Best Animation
- Fantoche International Animation Film Festival 2017, Swiss Audience Award