Scenes From The City
Animation • Animation, 31-Jan-2022
Though the big city may appear to be endless concrete and steel, it is teeming with hidden life underneath. So proposes the new film by Luke Strickler, “Scenes From the City,” an absurdist 3D animation that illustrates the behavior and thoughts of a series of sentient buildings, stop signs, and traffic lights. Building off the futuristic satire of his previous series, “2064,” Strickler’s new piece doubles down on the current moment (and perhaps the headlong dash to inject our lives with AI everything). In his vision, gentrifying condominiums head north for the spring in search of new tenets. At night, traffic lights experiment with new color patterns for a “dazzling new world of traffic.” The ‘Subway Queen’ decrees never-ending delays to appease the ‘Subway god.’ The chaos and grossness of the modern city is the target, and the technique is simple but sophisticated visuals of falling street cones, or pay phones spewing projectiles of urine. -KA. Director, animator: Luke Strickler.
Up Next in Animation
-
Waste Away
In a trash-filled city, a homeless woman's encounter with a fish takes an unexpected turn. Elly Stern directs “Waste Away,” a beautifully designed and executed stop-motion animated film, an allegory of motherhood in various forms, and a depiction of the overabundance, wastefulness and decay of mo...
-
The Itching
The Itching is a short horror film about two girlfriends whose cozy social life turns ugly when one of them contracts a mysterious illness. Beginning with a tiny itch, she rips a ragged hole in her own leg, a pooling landscape in which some terrible urge is reflected. I won’t reveal any more of t...
-
Flora Borealis
Two gay men struggle with depression in a ruined environment, and a botanical glassblower mourns his wife. “Flora Borealis,” directed by Casey Friedman, is a striking animated film that uses a post-apocalyptic setting to explore themes of destruction and perseverance. The young couple survives in...
