Unblending
2024 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Michelle Ku
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
For people whose minds split into competing inner voices, bedtime can bring a chorus of contradictory thoughts; drawing on somatic healing, the filmmaker quiets them in hand-painted animation.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Hand-painted animation about quieting intrusive thoughts is exactly the kind of premise that sounds insufferable until you see it executed—and then it's just insufferable in a way that actually *means* something, which is worse.
Ku situates somatic healing within a rigorous experimental lineage (Brakhage's bodily abstraction, the essay film's therapeutic impulse) and lets the hand-painted frame do the philosophical work—formally ambitious in its refusal of narrative convenience.
The entire film hinges on Ku's choice to let the painted brushstroke itself become the gesture of quieting—not illustrating calm, but *making* it tactile—and that single formal decision transforms a wellness concept into something genuinely moving.