The Clockmakers
2013 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Renaud Hallée
Genres: animation, experimental, musical
Tones: surreal, theatrical, whimsical
Tiny gymnasts leap and somersault through a whirling mechanism of gears, triangles, and lines in Renaud Hallée's experimental animation, where acrobatics trigger musical sequences.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's decorative abstraction masquerading as surrealism—whimsy without teeth, acrobatics in a void where nothing actually *happens*. The gear-and-line aesthetic feels more like a Vimeo design exercise than the experimental provocation it wants to be.
Hallée locates himself squarely in a lineage of kinetic abstraction—Oskar Fischinger's mechanical music-visualization meets mid-century avant-garde gymnastics cinema—and the restraint of the edit, the precision of sync between body and gear, argues for form as the true subject.
The decision to keep the gymnasts *small* within the frame—dwarfed by the mechanism rather than centered—reframes the entire power dynamic; suddenly it's not a virtuosity showcase but a meditation on bodies as components, and that single compositional choice is what makes this sing.