The Tesla World Light
2017 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Matthew Rankin
Genres: animation, biography, historical
Tones: contemplative, surreal, theatrical
In New York in 1905, visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one final appeal to his erstwhile benefactor J.P. Morgan, in an avant-garde animated film drawn from Tesla's real letters.
Picked by Margot
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Rankin takes the expected biopic genuflection and detonates it—animating Tesla's own words into something hallucinogenic and formally unhinged, which should feel like prestige-padding but somehow doesn't.
A film that knows exactly what it is: a historical document transmuted through avant-garde form, where the constraint of Tesla's letters and the rigor of animation become arguments about how biography itself should be represented.
The decision to *only* animate Tesla's actual language and correspondence—refusing dramatization entirely—forces the abstract visual language to do all the emotional work, and Rankin's restraint in that trade-off is what makes eight minutes feel inexhaustible.