Valley of the Moon
1973 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Ron Webber
Genres: animation, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
In an animated vision set in a moonlike valley, strange invented creatures appear and behave in ways that are alien in form yet oddly familiar in action, all without words.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 4-minute wordless creature ballet that could've been pretentious nonsense, except Webber's actually doing something stranger — making us feel genuinely unsettled by the *familiarity* hiding inside the alien forms, which is the opposite of what experimental animation usually reaches for.
Webber's restraint here is formally exquisite; the film knows exactly what it owes to mid-century avant-garde animation while pushing past pastiche through sheer economy of line and motion — this is the kind of work that sits comfortably in a lineage with McLaren and Trnka precisely because it refuses to merely imitate them.
The entire film hinges on one choice: letting the creatures' movements stay just plausible enough to read as behavior rather than collapsing into pure abstraction, and that single calibration — that restraint — transforms what could've been a visual exercise into something genuinely alive.