Spacy

When I was young, and House of Leaves had just come out, I remember asking my mother what it was about. Her answer seemed to have been considered as one that a child could understand, but something about the way she phrased it really freaked me out, and I've often thought back on the misconception I had about that story over the years.

As an adult, once I was able to examine my disturbed reaction, I found that to my understanding, it was a story about some men who are forced into the pursuit of something they don't understand. Travelling in spirals, in ever tightening concentric ... circles, driven by madness or lust or fear into smaller and more bizarre rooms until they eventually found themselves trapped in a singularity. I couldn't know if what they found there was a profound truth or a cruel emptiness.

Ito offers no answers, but he does retell that journey with uncanny resemblance.

TL;DR Uncanny experimental short exploring space, time and movement in innovative ways. It's done using drawings and executed well.

Story: The movie shows rapid camera movements in a gym. The camera moves and zooms into pictures of other gyms (placed on poles), and by this jumps into a new space. The angles, speed, movement directions in the gym before the next jump, forward and backward movements, colors and smoothness of the animation change over time. Camera movement starts slow, choppy, blue, and calm with few jumps. Then it evolves into fast movement, many jumps, flashing, red and yellowish, backwards and downwards. The animation ends with a ... still of a man in front of a wall, putting movement options to a halt. 7/10.

Art: The art is good, especially given this was made in 1981. The shapes used are all simple rectangular geometries, so CGI would have greatly helped with it. Hand drawing this effect in 1981 was pretty visionary. The level of detail is not over-boarding but it is better than average, e.g. the floors have visible structures where you could just have done flat grading. The scenes are color graded, with muddy blues, sepias, and reds. This again anticipates effects which only became widely and easily available much later with advances in CGI. 8/10.

Sound: Electronic noise style music supports the unsettling effect of the movement very well. Intensity increases over time, greatly contributing to the feeling of building tension. 4/10.

Character: Space and movement themselves are the actors, not humans. Space is special, so I give it a multiple of the rate normal space would get, one for each spacetime dimension. 4/10.

Enjoyment: Quite a bit, it's MC Escher the short experimental animation. Glad I watched this on a computer monitor only, not on a larger TV set. Leave a lone a VR headset, which must melt your brain. Of course there is no plot in the traditional sense, but the zoom effect along with colors and music directly attacks your brain's sense of reality. When was the last time you questioned space-time itself? After this movie, you do. It literally creates a few new neurons in places reality never would. 8/10

Overall rating: The short has a limited scope, which is to tease the brain with space and movement it is not used to. It completely achieves this. The whole endeavor anticipates cinematic techniques which became widely used only much later with the advance of CGI and color grading. However, it clearly has limits in that it has no real plot, no characters, and is pretty much a one-trick pony. It however resonates with me and I am sure I will remember it long after watching. This makes it an above average experimental short, which is 6/10 for me. (7+8+4+4+8+6)/6=6.16

Edit: Typos and grammar.