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Fairytale Shorts

22 September 2019

Run Time

43 mins

American independent filmmaker Anna Biller handmade costumes, sets, props and music for Fairy Ballet, an adaptation of her theatre production. Chilean papier-mâché animation Strange Creatures is a modern fable for the climate change era, in which forest animals discover humans are the truly strange creatures.

Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles

Part-pagan ritual, part-fairytale, this dance around the Maypole produced by venerable English progressive rock stalwarts Jethro Tull is a fantastical, psychedelic happening. With music and spoken word taken from the group’s 1973 album A Passion Play, the film was made as a visual component of their elaborately-produced tour for the album. As such, it is rarely considered on its own outside of the band’s context, but the short film is an exhilarating and humourous work that touches on many aspects of fairytale and folklore.

Country

Year

1973

Dialogue Language

English

Duration

7 mins

Music performer

Jethro Tull

Producer

Jethro Tull

The Cat

Mačka

The Cat is an interesting meeting of the Yugoslavian animation studio Zagreb Film and Rome’s Corona Cinematografica, a prominent producer of documentaries, animation and experimental films. The short film was directed by Zlatko Bourek, one of the prized animators in the Zagreb School, a term for a group of Yugoslav animators whose works of social satire and modernist design became inter- nationally recognised from the late 1950s through the 1970s. A day-glo adaptation of Aesop’s ‘Venus and the Cat’, The Cat holds many hallmarks of psychedelic-era art and design: shocking colours, marbled or textured backgrounds and Aubrey Beardsley-esque figures, both nude and clothed.

Director

Countries

Year

1971

Dialogue Language

Italian

Duration

10 mins

Fairy Ballet

Anna Biller’s short Fairy Ballet could perhaps be considered an outlier among the American independent filmmaker’s body of work. Most known for films that take on cult and genre cinemas, upending their conventions to infuse a female gaze and perspective not commonly shown, Biller has been hailed by critics and audiences for her features Viva and The Love Witch, as well as a body of short filmmaking.

Director

Country

Year

1998

Dialogue Language

English

Duration

11 mins

Strange Creatures

Extrañas Criaturas

“Nothing could alter the calm of the forest… or so it seemed”. Strange Creatures is a beautifully stylistic papier-mâché animation which can be understood as a modern fable. The film is the first collaboration between Cristóbal Léon—who has made a number of successful short and feature films over the past years in collaboration with Joaquín Cociña—and illustrator and animator Cristina Sitja. It is an adaptation of Sitja’s 2014 children’s book of the same title (Extrañas Criaturas in Spanish) in which she wanted to talk about the effects of human actions on nature.

Director

Country

Year

2019

Premiere

Dialogue Language

Spanish

Subtitle Language

Primary Contact

Javiera Ramírez

Duration

15 mins

Producer

Cristina Sitja

Distributor

Javiera Ramírez