Winter In The Rainforest
2019 · 9m · Estonia
Directed by Anu-Laura Tuttelberg
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Fragile porcelain puppets move at their own dreamlike pace inside real rainforest footage shot in Chiapas and the Peruvian Amazon, where flowers turn carnivorous and time runs wild.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Tuttelberg's doing something genuinely odd here—porcelain puppets as a foreign body moving through documentary rainforest footage—but it feels too precious, too aware of its own whimsy to actually disturb anything. The surrealism lands polite instead of subversive.
A formally rigorous meditation on scale and temporality: the puppets' deliberate, handmade movements create a temporal counter-rhythm against the raw documentary landscape, situating itself in a lineage of expanded animation that goes back through the Quays and beyond. The editing syntax between puppet and rainforest footage is the real argument here.
The decision to layer fragile, deliberately-paced puppetry over uncontrolled, real rainforest material creates friction that shouldn't work but does—that collision between handcrafted and documentary is what transforms a modest technical setup into something that lingers.
Reviews
While moving the puppets frame by frame, I let the light and the nature in the background move naturally. In this way, the puppets are moving smoothly in their own pace and the nature around them is changing rapidly.