Toil and Spin uses minimalist visuals to evoke the drifting sensations of sleep and the turbulence of sleeplessness–an oarless journey through memory, regret, and restless thought. Stop motion animation.
A woman stands at her window, staring out into the summer night, when a luminous body enters and bursts into the atmosphere. Time is suspended, and the woman takes a journey through space and time, at three hundred thousand kilometres per second...
Óscar begins to isolate himself in his playful childhood world. His best friend, Jesús, no longer wants to play after falling in love with Betsa, a schoolmate. Caught between leaving childhood behind or continuing to play alone, terrorist violence erupts, forcing Óscar to grow up overnight and abandon his hometown. Forty years later, he remembers it all as he walks along the highway back to his hometown, searching for food and shelter amid the COVID-19 crisis.
The animation portrays a world where creativity and individuality are constantly under pressure from rigid structures of authority. Characters attempt to speak, draw, and create freely, only to encounter looming barriers of walls, erasures, and silencing figures that symbolize censorship. Yet, each act of suppression sparks new forms of expression: muted voices transform into louder symbols, erased drawings reappear in stronger colors, and silenced characters find new ways to communicate. Through shifting imagery and contrasts, bright, playful expressions clashing with stark, restrictive forces, the piece underscores the resilience of human creativity. Even when censored, expression adapts, resists, and resurfaces in unexpected forms. Ultimately, the animation serves as both a warning and a celebration: a warning about the suffocating effects of censorship, and a celebration of the unstoppable force of free expression. It suggests that no matter how often creativity is suppressed, it finds a way back into the open, often stronger than before.
Hertz, an astronaut, the son of a once-mad musician lost to time; Coco, a ghost, who in past life had longed to become an opera singer. A tragic collision draws the astronaut into her realm—a forgotten theater adrift in the void of space. Hand in hand, they awaken the slumbering stage, and through haunting melodies, resurrect the tangled echoes of their pasts.
The dreamer wakes up in abstract vastness. In this surreal space, terrain is unfixed and moves in time. As the dreamer starts running from the impermanent, they come to accept the unknown. Nothing can remain still.
The unholy cycle Humans come and snatch creatures from their natural environment. Kill them for their own purposes. Deities come and say: not this one. Throw it back into the sea. In the sea there are friends and enemies, eating and being eaten, luck and chance. The ocean is the mother of all creatures. This one is taken back. It is repaired and given a task. Who would find that strange? Humans come and take, destroy, kill. Make room for the bright side of life.
The Blank Canvas is a hybrid live-action and animated short film about the paralysis of beginning. Unlike Newton, who grabs the apple that hits him, the protagonist indulges herself in a pile of ideas, refusing to start until she finds that perfect one - when all she really needs is a rough start.
ANIMATION MARATHON
