INTERPHASE
2019 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Kenny Tran
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An animated visual poem about reconciling past trauma through an anthropomorphic figure born from and covered by surrounding flora.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute visual poem about trauma wrapped in flora sounds like exactly the kind of earnest metaphor I'd normally dismiss, but Tran's actually doing something genuinely strange with the form—the anthropomorphic figure bleeding into its environment resists easy symbolic reading, which means it might actually stick.
Tran positions this squarely in the lineage of experimental animation concerned with embodiment and natural forms—Chap Hop, Huang, that strain of lyrical abstraction—but the craft lives in the editing rhythm that lets flora and figure become visually indistinguishable without losing the figure's interiority; it's formally rigorous about its own ambiguity.
Two minutes is nothing, but the decision to animate the anthropomorphic figure *as* the plant matter rather than *against* it—no boundary between subject and environment—is the structural choice that transforms what could've been a greeting-card metaphor into something genuinely unsettling and earned.
Reviews
This universal theme of deconstructing and repairing as we move through stages of life is the focus of Digital Painting and Expanded Animation student @wundertales's animated film "Interphase"