Miserable Miracle
2023 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Ryo Orikasa
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Inspired by Henri Michaux's mescaline writings and drawings, animated shapes, sounds, and movements explore the limits of language and perception.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Michaux as source material is refreshingly weird—a psychonaut's fever dream filtered through animation—but the execution plays it too respectfully, like it's illustrating lecture notes instead of *becoming* the mescaline itself.
Orikasa stakes this firmly in the lineage of psychedelic animation and visual poetry (Brakhage, Fischinger), using abstract form to track the phenomenological rupture Michaux documented; the rigor is in refusing narrative scaffolding entirely.
The choice to sync the shape-dissolution to fractured phonetic utterances rather than music creates this uncanny cognitive dissonance—suddenly you're *feeling* the boundary between sound and meaning dissolve, which is the whole thesis done in sound design.