Minus Plus Multiply
2023 · 4m · UK
Directed by Chu-Chieh Lee
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A woman navigates a strange world filled with towering containers on a self-searching, healing journey that explores the relationship between emotion and space.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a 4-minute mood piece dressed up as experimental, which means it mostly just *feels* transgressive without actually committing to anything weird—the containers, the self-searching, the emotion-space riff all feel like they're gesturing at profundity instead of actually interrogating it.
Lee's spatial composition here sits squarely in the lineage of contemplative animation that treats the frame as psychological geography; the restraint of the palette and the deliberate pacing show a filmmaker fluent in the grammar of minimalist visual metaphor, even at 4 minutes.
The choice to let negative space—those cavernous gaps between containers—do the emotional legwork instead of filling the frame is what lands this; it's a formally economical decision that makes the tenderness feel earned rather than imposed.
Reviews
Animated films about solitary figures wandering surreal landscapes in search of freedom are common — even clichéd — but Chu-Chieh Lee's Minus Plus Multiply stands out. It succeeds thanks to a conceptually rich and emotionally layered approach that invites audiences to discover their own interpretations.
Festivals
- Golden Harvest Awards 2025, Best Animation Award
- Animation Festival of Roanne 2025, Experimental Grand Prix
- Golden Horse Awards 2024, Nomination
- Insomnia International Open-Air Animation Festival 2024, The Special Distinction of the Jury
- Kuandu International Animation Festival 2024, Taiwan Special Award
- Ann Arbor Film Festival 2024, Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker
- Thomas Edison Film Festival 2024, Jury's Choice Award