World-building is a crucial concept in cinematic creation, facilitating the audience’s empathy with and immersion into the universe a film is conjuring. In animation, where often the world is being built utterly from scratch out of the filmmakers’ imaginations, the world-building itself can play an even more fundamental role in the basic definition, expression, and reception of the work. Inspired by the Academy Museum’s temporary exhibition celebrating master animation world-builder Hayao Miyazaki, this program explores the radically diverse and wildly imaginative approaches that some experimental animators have taken in creating their own audiovisual universes. This program features three recent digital shorts alongside three classic films restored by the Academy Film Archive, each developing and exploring its own incredibly unique and vivid landscape in a way that only animation can enable. Through techniques including stop-motion, cel animation, computer generated imagery (CGI), and complex photographic experimentation, these six films invite us into their worlds as they variously touch on video games, antique toys, Afrofuturism, mystical visions, space bunnies, and phallic asparagus.

Programmed and notes by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano 

This program contains mild adult content. 

Octane
Director: Jeron Braxton. 
2018. 6.5 min. USA. Color. English. Digital. 
Courtesy of the artist. 

The Golden Chain
Directors: Adebukola Bodunrin, Ezra Claytan Daniels.
2016. 14 min. USA. Color. English. DCP. 
Courtesy of the artists. 

Ace of Light
Director: Sky David.
1984. 7.5 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. 
Restored by the Academy Film Archive. 

Asparagus 
Director: Suzan Pitt. 
1979. 19 min. USA. Color. 35mm. 
Restored by the Academy Film Archive. 

Solar Walk 
Director: Réka Bucsi. 
2018. 21 min. Denmark/Hungary. Color. DCP. 
Courtesy of the artist. 

The Secret Story 
Director: Janie Geiser. 
1996. 8.5 min. USA. Color. 16mm. 
Restored by the Academy Film Archive.

All film screenings of Available Space are available here.