Street Musique
1972 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Ryan Larkin
Genres: animation, experimental, musical
Tones: surreal, theatrical, whimsical
Animator Ryan Larkin improvises exuberant drawings to music by sidewalk entertainers, moving from abstractions to caricatures of familiar rituals without words.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Larkin's refusal to choose between abstraction and representation—letting the music dictate whether we get gestural squiggles or satirical street life—is genuinely unsettling in how it works; most animators would pick a lane and stay there, but he's too restless.
Street Musique sits precisely in the lineage of direct animation and visual jazz, where Larkin's improvisational response to live musicians becomes a formal argument about animation's relationship to time and performance—the editing is invisible because the pacing IS the argument.
The singular choice here is letting the pencil mark itself—Larkin's hand visible, correcting, layering, abandoning—rather than cleaning it up; that one decision to embrace the sketch as finished object transforms what could be playful doodling into something genuinely alive and present.