Festival Fantoche Baden 2025

To our eyes, Seun Yee’s Boundaries is not only impressive for its simultaneously simple and complex construction, but also for allowing the introduction of the two perspectives through which we will gather the eight other films we would like to discuss here. On one hand, the storytelling is quite realistic and somewhat linear in showing an escalation of conflicts that are able to bind the minor, individual dimension to the societal one. It is a question of cohabitation, of dealing with the space between the private and the public needs. As such, on the other hand, Seun Yee superposes an abstract layer of animation with geometrical figures and architectural plans, a choreography of formal movements that both interpret and express the conflicts and their possible solutions. (GDS)

Seun Yee, KOR 2025, 12’

«A sharp light floats, flashes, burns, soothes, starts the tale, ends or loops permanently». Together with the displaying of abstract figures, these words fix the vocabulary with which Tata Managadze tells her story. The most powerful scene that remains engraved in my memory shows a material star sliding down the stairs and scratching the walls of a building. This scene also summarises the two dialectic elements playing in the film: stars and their light on one side, and an urban architecture made of concrete on the other. Lights – joyful and disruptive – have a vectorial function, whereas the space is structured in maps, layers, and frames. It contains and limits, it defines the ins and the outs. The story, if there is one, is developed in a sequence of three moments, day-night-day, where the stars can break the boundaries of space, made possible by more than their force of transformation. The flowers and birds into which they transform also brings new colours into the film. (GDS)

Tata Managadze, GEO-PT-FIN-BE (European Joint Master RE:Anima) 2024, 8’

Yoriko Mizushiri is well known for her distinctive style that sensually celebrates the haptic dimension. The alphabet of Ordinary Life is made of hands, shoes, a dog, a mushroom, a plastic bag, hair, two nigiris and their plates. They dance, slowly, with oneiric lightness. They are not just objects, but also paradigmatic bearers of perceptual sensations, like the mushroom representing material texture, or the plastic bag representing lightness. Moments of contemplation do not break the quiet but steady movement, a sort of eternal inertia of the things, human and non-human all together, until horizontal blinds and their light play fragment the continuity of the aforementioned things. This fragmentation comes with the appearance of a new protagonist – a wedding ring – that brings a caesura, at least in the music, which before was perfectly tuned in on the animated gestures. Something is changing, the tempo accelerates slightly, the elements interact more and more frequently in a crescendo of confusion. Is this wedding ring hinting at a possible dramatic story? That’s up to our imagination. The ring slides away from the cut finger, the woman’s nose touches the nose of her dog. (GDS)

Yoriko Mizushiri, FR-JAP 2025, 10’

White. Then it all begins with a flower blossoming into a butterfly, which flies away. Beside this, a thick bodies self-generates from the soil, then walks away, but nothing disappears. Instead, all transforms into some other form, be it vaguely human, clearly animal or possibly vegetable. Meejin Hong’s Deluge develops itself as an all-encompassing tableau that exalts transformation or, more precisely, cyclic transformation, for in such global metamorphosis a growing series of closed cycles superpose, one upon the other. While the tableau saturates, leaving no empty corner, we recognise the biographical stations of human life, peeping out from the self-devouring magma of organic-and-inorganic expelling-and-ingesting. When the screen starts to begin with entirely black scenes, and traces of white forms suggest something akin to skeletons, we know that this Deluge is a unique and visionary depiction of life itself! (GDS)

Meejin Hong, USA 2024, 12’

With “diffusion” in the title, Aurelijus Ciupas is referring to the AI programme “Stable Diffusion”, which he uses in a sort of competition with the AI model. The simple fact of really using it, instead of simply falling down the rabbit-hole of its potentialities and overwhelming data generation, is already a way to rival it and denote one’s own creative signature. In a journey of highly heterogeneous qualities of pictures, photographic vibrations and morphing effects prevail, not without some crescendos of subliminal imagery. Diffraction and disturbance seem to be the most powerful weapons in Ciupas’ competition with the AI image generation, ending the film with a random dot pixel pattern as a variation on the theme of the white noise found in cathodic television. A medium reflection and self-reflection. (GDS)

Aurelijus Ciupas, EST 2024, 7’

We see this link at play in autobiographical 2D vignettes like Sameh Alaa’s S the Wolf, which delivers a bathetic tale of hair-loss, masculinity and the father-son connection with offhand humour, eclectic musical references and a quiet poignancy. We see it also in Paradaïz, another 2D piece by Matea Radic, a multidisciplinary artist based in Winnipeg. Radic’s visual language is remarkably mature, despite this being her first film: a mix of surreal/absurdist shifts in proportions and early-Disney-nodding line-work that both contrasts and augments the childhood trauma at the core of the film. Memories of Radic experiencing the bombing of her native Sarajevo as a child blend with a darkly humorous account of her visiting the same city as an adult, but form here is matter: behind the visual invention lies the tangible vulnerability of a child’s frightened imagination, and the tenderness of the animator reaching out to her former self. (PMC)

S the Wolf, Sameh Alaa, FRA EGY, 10’
Paradaïz, Matea Radic, CAN 2025, 9’

It’s with puppetry, I believe, that the subject/matter imprint comes to the fore. In Long Live Livia, Zach Dorn uses stop-motion to recreate scenes from his family’s home movies. When the recordings fall short, he turns to scenes from The Sopranos to fill in the gaps. These are, to borrow Alison Landsberg’s definition, prosthetic memories, but shot-through with individual and material concreteness – as if reappropriated, indeed re-subjectified, even as the film itself acknowledges their artificial & pre-mediated nature. It’s heady stuff, theoretically, but once again it also feels raw and desperately human, as Dorn looks for traces of what he’s lost. Or, as he puts it in a devastating line, “for an explanation on how we got here, stumbling, and furious that nothing kept its promise.” (PMC)

Zach Dorn, USA 2025, 17’

Of course, film-makers can leverage the subject/matter potential of animation beyond autobiography. In Shadows, for example, Rand Beiruty uses 2D digital images to shield her young interviewee, an Iraqi teenager who emigrated to Germany, and to give imaginative substance to her traumas. In Winter in March, Natalia Mirzoyan follows similar approach, but this time using puppetry to visualise the audio recording of two dissidents who escaped Russia after the Ukraine invasion. It is a dazzling spectacle, with a heart-wrenching material tenderness. Motifs of powerlessness and suppression recur, such as strips of fabric tying the characters’ arms, blending surrealism with all-too-real angst. It's Mirzoyan's first puppet animation film too, which makes it all the more impressive. (PMC)

Shadows, Rand Beiruty, JOR FRA 2024, 12’
Winter in March, Natalia Mirzoyan, EST ARM FRA 2025, 16’

Diverging further from biographies and documents, a final crop of films uses the medium to build tales with broader allegorical reach. Particularity gives way to universality, as these films move away from embodied memories and practices to project their concerns onto a larger plane, focussing (as was the case with Boundaries at the beginning of this page) on the shared aspects of living. For example: Masataka Kihara’s Q (a mixture of rotoscoping and digital 2D animation) blends modern city-life alienation with an atmosphere of doleful uncertainty, injecting a Murakami-esque quality to a strange ghost story. Xiaoxuan Han’s Crow, Starfish and Unicorn uses minute and elegant line-work to deliver a mesmerizing tale of loss, parenthood, and the tragic attempt to replace what is gone at the expense of what is there. (PMC)

Q, Masataka Kihara, JAP 2025, 8’
Crow, Starfish and Unicorn, Xiaoxuan Han, CHI 2024, 16’

Standing out in this final harvest is Jenny Jokela’s Dollhouse Elephant, a darkly delightful piece about individual obsessions, and how they both strain and potentially enrich our collective existence. Jokela’s style is painterly, but has the subversive charge of underground comics, with acerbic colours, masses and surfaces twisting under the stress of narrative tension. Viewers witness the frictions and mounting frustrations among neighbours living in close proximity in a block of flats. Pressed on by pulsating choir vocals (orchestrated by classical composer Sebastian Hilli) the film culminates in a crescendo that is both hopeful and (like animation itself) a testament to the visceral and uncompromising force of human desire.

Jenny Jokela, FIN 2025, 11’