Nearly 1300 Rubik's Cubes
2015 · United States
Directed by Joe Penna
Genres: animation, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
A wordless pixel-art love story in which a robot launches into space, lands on a distant planet, finds love, and rockets off again — animated frame by frame using nearly 1,300 mini Rubik's cubes.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to coo over the gimmick—1,300 cubes, three weeks, look how clever—but Penna actually uses the pixel constraint to do something genuinely strange: strip emotion down to its purest geometric form, make a love story that's almost abstract. Most people would've buried the method under sentimentality; he let the limitation become the language.
There's a lineage here worth tracing—from early computer art and constraint-based animation through to contemporary makers thinking formally about medium specificity—and Penna executes with the kind of disciplined restraint that recalls both structuralist film and the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, grief expressed through simplification.
The decision to render emotional beats through pixel-art color shifts rather than expressive movement is what makes this sing; every frame had to be *solved* rather than drawn, which forces a visual economy that somehow makes a robot's goodbye more devastating than any traditional animation could manage.
Reviews
It took 1,296 Rubik's cubes to animate this video about robot love
a stop-motion pixel art animated love story between two robots