Spotlight on Poland: Platige Image

BY Robert BellPublished Jun 1, 2010

Platige Image is a Polish post-production studio that specializes in animation and visual effects, having recently worked on Antichrist, bringing bloody ejaculate and dead fawns to visual fruition. This series highlights a few of their recent animated shorts, showing mainly thematically challenging works with a dark, distinct vision that begs to be seen.

It starts with The Cathedral, which, to be honest, looks a lot like the computer animation in videogames, but shows a man walking through a cathedral built by past lives and rooted bodies, implying permanency through the fingerprints we leave behind in life. It's considerably heavier than The Great Escape, a short that features a weather channel sun come to life in a television, struggling to escape from its confines.

Fallen Art literally shows a man making art from the many bodies and blood splatters of soldiers pushed from a tower, not really masking its allegory, while Teaching-infinity proves somewhat more obtuse, featuring robots on mysterious planets with strange geometric designs.

Next, the fable of Noah's Ark is revamped with a typically dark Polish vision in Ark, which takes place on a futuristic ark after a virus has destroyed most of humankind. It's quite engaging and beautiful, as is Moloch, wherein the nature of nihilism is tackled with enjoyable soberness.

These more than make up for the sexist shorts Chick and Mantis, which each portray women as passive vessels and sexual vipers, respectively.

Of course, making it through these two is worth it when you consider how wonderful Kinematograph is. Showing a man on the cusp of inventing the moving picture, it captures how manic obsession can take the focus from problems unfolding before our eyes. It is detailed animation with a touching story of priorities and love.

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