
Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.
8.8Two recap specials that focus on Team Urameshi's matches in the Dark Tournament and four separate volumes focusing around one of the main characters; Yusuke, Kurama, Hiei, or Kuwabara.
6.2Tokyo, 2014: a city balancing on the razor's edge between financial prosperity and seismic destruction. It is a place where the lights are bright, the stakes are high, and where the threat of imminent destruction breeds crime like a disease. But for Gokuu Furinji, ex-cop and super-powered private detective, crime is money...
7.0It is 300 years into the future. Earth's environment had been devastated by mankind's own foolish plans and humankind is beleaguered by the sentient forests which they have awoken. The world balance is tipped when a young boy named Agito stumbles across a machine that glowed in a strange blue hue inside a forbidden sanctuary.
6.5Pikachu and the gang learn responsibility, teamwork as well as cooperation during their Summer vacation at Pokemon Island.
7.2Naruto and his friends must get back a jug of stolen holy water from a band of higher class ninjas.
7.5Depicts the day that Naruto Uzumaki became the 7th Hokage.
7.0Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.
6.5The seven short films making up GENIUS PARTY couldn’t be more diverse, linked only by a high standard of quality and inspiration. Atsuko Fukushima’s intro piece is a fantastic abstraction to soak up with the eyes. Masaaki Yuasa, of MIND GAME and CAT SOUP fame, brings his distinctive and deceptively simple graphic style and dream-state logic to the table with “Happy Machine,” his spin on a child’s earliest year. Shinji Kimura’s spookier “Deathtic 4,” meanwhile, seems to tap into the creepier corners of a child’s imagination and open up a toybox full of dark delights. Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle” conjures up a vision of virtual reality, while Yuji Fukuyama’s "Doorbell" and "Baby Blue" by Shinichiro Watanabe use understated realism for very surreal purposes. And Shoji Kawamori, with “Shanghai Dragon,” takes the tropes and conventions of traditional anime out for very fun joyride.
6.4Lupin's plans to intercept two old glass photographic plates from being delivered to a mysterious art dealer named Mr. Suzuki misfires, and it doesn't help matters that Goemon and Jigen are suffering from... efficiency problems. Meanwhile, Inspector Zenigata has a new tag-along in the Lupin chase: the beautiful young reporter Maria. But what is Maria's connection to the mysterious Mr. Suzuki?
6.3Five stories, five maestros, five styles and one common denominator: maximum creativity. Studio 4°C, the coolest label on the planet, invites us for the second time to an exclusive reunion of a talents with a group film, full of freedom and ingenuity, that goes from Mahiro Maeda's classic anime, to Kazuto Nakazawa's intricate urban sketches, Shinya Ohira's bedlam of color and Tatsuyuki Tanaka's animated cyberpunk. And as if that wasn't enough, Koji Morimoto, the studio big boss, is charge of putting the icing on the cake with fantafabulous piece of abstract poetry that would make a VJ die of ecstasy. The party of the year.
7.3While looking for her cat, a young woman and some kids find an abandoned building where strange things happen and the rules of physics don't always apply. Part of the Animatrix collection of animated shorts set in the Matrix universe.
6.6When Lupin heads to the kingdom of Zufu to pilfer its treasure, he incurs the wrath of its psychotic ruler General Headhunter, who places a dead-or-alive bounty on his head.
8.5Following the events of Cardcaptor Sakura Movie 2: The Sealed Card, Kero and Spinel share a plate of takoyaki (octopus balls). They get into a fight over who gets the last piece, and in the process send it flying out the window. They both chase the takoyaki, and each other, in a mighty effort to be the "takoyaki captor".
6.6After the destruction of Nibelheim at the hands of Sephiroth, Zack and Cloud are on the run from Shinra Inc. As they make their way back to Midgar, they recall the horrible events that happened at Nibelheim, as well as fight for survival against Shinra.
7.1Everyone's favorite TV superhero Action Mask shows up in Kasukabe, and he's trying to get something from Shin-chan -- but what could it be?
6.5In the distant technological future, civilization has reached its ultimate Net-based form. An "infection" in the past caused the automated systems to spiral out of order, resulting in a multi-leveled city structure that replicates itself infinitely in all directions. Now humanity has lost access to the city's controls, and is hunted down and purged by the defense system known as the Safeguard. In a tiny corner of the city, a little enclave known as the Electro-Fishers is facing eventual extinction, trapped between the threat of the Safeguard and dwindling food supplies. A girl named Zuru goes on a journey to find food for her village, only to inadvertently cause doom when an observation tower senses her and summons a Safeguard pack to eliminate the threat. With her companions dead and all escape routes blocked, the only thing that can save her now is the sudden arrival of Killy the Wanderer, on his quest for the Net Terminal Genes, the key to restoring order to the world.
6.1A plover chick has not learned to fly when his family migrates in the fall. He must survive the arctic winter, vicious enemies and himself in order to be reunited with his beloved one next spring.
7.3Naruto faces off against his old pupil Konohamaru in a tournament during the chuunin entrance exams.
6.3One day, Pikachu and its friends are walking along when they suddenly fall through a Diglett hole and into Pokémon Valley, a secret location that no one knows about. Pikachu and its buddies tell the Pokémon that they could use some help looking for Togepi, who fell through the hole first. The group sets off and eventually finds Togepi in the Exeggcute nest—but one of the Exeggcute is missing. That leads the group on another hunt; this time, though, Pikachu and its friends come back to the nest empty-handed. That’s when a storm begins to brew, filling Pokémon valley with roaring thunder and gusts of wind that almost blow the friends—and the Exeggcute nest—away! Are the friends going to be able to keep the nest safe and reunite the Exeggcute?
6.7Aldin, a vagabond water vendor, embarks of a series of fantastical and tragic misadventures through the Middle East in search of love, fortune, and power.
7.0Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.
7.6A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.
4.7Three books: a film festival catalogue, a dictionary, the Bible. Three works whose materiality has become obsolete by the digital dematerialization. A commentary on the fragility of culture.
0.0Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.
0.0Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.
We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background.
4.5Ki-No-Ko is a surreal five-minute short film published on Art of Silent Hill, Lost Memories: The Art & Music of Silent Hill and The Silent Hill Experience.
6.0In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the International Experimental Film Festival Held in Brussels in 1958 in association with the World's Fair. Stan Brakhage described the film as "an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece".
5.0A tale about a kid, a samurai mime, and a stripper who all try to defeat a warlord and an evil clown who have successfully turned a countryside into a never ending nightmare filled with horrible monsters.
10.0This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.
6.8An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.
7.3Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.
5.9Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.
5.3Animation using cutout animation to craft a bizarre science fiction experiment. Moving spheres, such as balloons and bubbles, are superimposed on static backgrounds to suggest travel and discovery.
0.0A space occupies it, awaiting to be unlocked by a freeing action or notion. What lies ahead is its determination.
5.6A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .
7.0A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”