While Ovis repairs her ship during a spacewalk, she accidentally uncloaks the Impression, a spaceship previously lost in spacetime. Her crew finds two members alive, leading to a new mission to Ice Nexus, a portal that might let them recover the stolen Inventory of the Mind.

Michael Lavine, best known as a music photographer, has been creating a series of films over the past few years. This is the second part of his ongoing stop-motion passion project, The Dark Odyssey. (You can watch the first part on his website). Stop-motion animation is challenging, and Lavine has taken on most of the project alone. While he has professional skills in some areas, he's also tackling things like costuming, where he's more of an amateur. This mix gives the films a unique mood and universe.

One character is named Lem, likely a nod to sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem. So far the films lack Lem’s irony and humor, but they do feel more akin to Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Lem’s novel Solaris.

Rita Casdia’s Tree Story is more a study of form and design than a narrative. Pink elongated ghosts hang from a black, gothic tree within a neutrally-colored void. As the shapes begin to fall, they echo the worm-like creatures in Eraserhead. Other images suggest Eden, evoking themes of origins, sin, and mythological trees of life. It might sound clichéd to say you could pull every frame as a work of art, but in this case, it’s true. Each image is crafted with exceptional care.

Txotxongiloa is a series of brief episodes that explore women’s existence through the metaphor of puppets and marionettes. The animation is fantastic, and the setting designs and textures are stunning. Jimmy Bidaurrete’s music and sound design are superb and varied without being distracting.

Some sequences, like the Sisyphus and birth scenes, stand out for their clarity. However, others are less clear. For instance, a few characters that reminded me of the Letter People emerge from a dumpster to become part-time companions, but their roles are ambiguous. Are they orphans? The disenfranchised? Nonbinary? At times, the sequences felt too obvious, while other times I felt like I was missing something.

This wonderfully dark fairy tale follows a young and infertile farming couple raising ducks while trying to conceive. As they struggle with childlessness, one of the ducks gets injured, and the wife starts caring for it like a newborn baby. The world and characters of this stop-motion horror folk tale are animated but not cartoony, giving them a stony, yet brittle, quality that mirrors the human characters.

Through magical and mythological means, a young girl finds a cyclops skull. By accident, she brings him back to life, and they become friends. The humor gives the short a kids’ show vibe, but the gore suggests a different channel. The writing and characters would benefit from a longer format; as it stands, there’s too much development and too many events packed into a short runtime. This film is hard to rate as a whole because it feels like a young filmmaker finding their footing. However, director Justin Edwards leverages his background to create an effects-heavy short. The amount of visual effects in a presumably low-budget film is astounding. I love the nod to Krull, and Asclepius, the host of Whisper Magic, is ridiculous yet marvelously spot-on.

Under the Midnight Sun
Written and directed by Mélissa Faivre
2022, 10 minutes

Under the Midnight Sun, a meditation and manipulation of high contrast light and shadow depicting a post-apocalypse. It feels like a dream one of the characters in La Jetée or Begotten might have. The film points forward to an undefined future while echoing the early days of cinema, with shapes and textures reminiscent of William Dickson’s experimental works like Monkeyshines, No. 1 from the 1890s. An equal partner in creating the film's enveloping mood and atmosphere is the dark, droning, and ambient sound by YOKE.

With an opening scene that feels like it could have come straight from an early-80s hazmat suit film like Contamination, Septichexen begins with a microbiologist testing Bergen’s drinking water at various points along the sewer system. The city's water supply is contaminated, and she’s searching for the source, which ultimately leads her down into a darkness she would have never expected. The light, colors, and grain of the shots often evoke a warm, low-budget sci-fi mood, yet the images can also become elegant and disturbingly evocative, resembling an eco-horror fairy tale.

The poisoning by the Sewer Witch leads to exposition that is sometimes enjoyable. Some may find it reminiscent of a villain's monologue before attempting to kill James Bond and hold the world hostage, while others might appreciate hearing the monster speak. Though I have mixed feelings about the exposition, the short as a whole is like stepping into a dark, fantastical world. Despite its horrifying connotations, I found it gripping and surprisingly fun.

Astrogolem presents an alternate universe where a tentacled Nikola Tesla and Alan Turing accidentally release demons into their world. They seek Robo-Marie Curie in hopes she can help them. The short begins like a Terry Gilliam animation for Monty Python, filtered through alchemy and Adult Swim sensibilities—a bit like Karel Zeman creating mashups for Tim and Eric. It’s manic, goofy, bizarre, and sometimes beautiful. The ending montage is both gorgeous and grotesque, creating such a tonal shift that it’s hard to grasp the whole thing on a first viewing. Then again, the film's world is built from the chopped and spliced, so why not the narrative?

shemortelle portrays a ritual of the Matriarchy of Brussels, where a vampire relinquishes her powers and immortality. Set in an electro-Jodorowskian DJ dungeon with decor and lighting sometimes reminiscent of ‘70s Dario Argento, the short is filled with striking and poetic images and colors. However, the horror elements are less impactful. The artistic costume design and edited sequences are so captivating that I would have preferred experiencing the imagery and ritual without the voiceover text on a first viewing.

St. Mickeyland is a tour through tableaus of outdated technologies and barren landscapes populated by pop culture ephemera and cultural detritus. A Boschian hellscape inhabited by Billie Eilish, Skeletor, and a heroin-addicted Snow White. A visual form of plunderphonics, or the great nightmare of an AI attempting to recreate culture as it burps and dies in some form of armageddon, not with a bang, but with a giggle. St. Mickeyland takes its time, moving slowly, not manicly like so many other popular culture collage pieces.

And while the short can be read as ecocriticism, it’s ghastly and hilarious at the same time. I keep hearing in my head the sequence where Greta Thunberg mentions the TV and Fred Flintstone heckles her with a full-hearted, “Yabba Dabba Doo!”

Mary, Billybud, and Fumbleton are three miniature humans who star in a children’s show. Tragically, the creator and director of the show dies in the studio, yet the star’s continue filming amid the sets and costumes falling into disrepair, mirroring the decay of their creator.

In one memorable scene, Fumbleton delivers a nude waist-down reading from Hamlet. When asked about his unconventional costume choice, he shouts through his full-head mask, "Nobody’s bloody watching!" Overall, it's a magical blend of whimsy and despair.

I would love to see a longer version that delves deeper into the characters and expands upon the events without feeling unnecessarily compressed. Nevertheless, despite a few grumbles, the movie creates a breathtaking, harsh, and absurd world.

Composed mostly of images and sounds from other movies, ymoR depicts the revelations Romy Schneider had about her childhood (her family colluding with the Nazis while she lived with her grandparents and abuse by a stepfather). It’s also a hallucinatory embodiment of her image as described by Coco Chanel: “The ultimate incarnation of the ideal woman.” In many ways, it also felt like a visual poetic depiction of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” with her skin “Bright as a Nazi lampshade” and ability to “...eat men like air.” There is also a quirky sense of humor, similar to Plath’s own.

Julien Lahmi refers to his works as mashup cinema. I’ve heard similar works that use images and sound from cinema’s history called found footage. An example is The Green Fog or much of Peter Tscherkassky’s chimerical and darkly sublime work. To get a sense of the genre, you can see Lahmi’s Munchsferatu on his Vimeo. He’s created a narrative based on Munch’s painting "The Vampire", in which David Bowie is the vampiric artist and Christina Hendricks is the red-haired woman in the painting.

ymoR includes an AI credit, which may be a dealbreaker for some, though I didn’t notice anything obviously AI on first viewing.