Private Lessons

Step back into the imaginative and frankly terrifying world of Becky & Joe with Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. In this episode: Some things change over Time.

Animator Ryan Larkin does a visual improvisation to music performed by a popular group presented as sidewalk entertainers. His take-off point is the music, but his own beat is more boisterous than that of the musicians. The illustrations range from convoluted abstractions to caricatures of familiar rituals. Without words.

A hep teen hears a tune on the jukebox at the malt shop and calls his girl; She rounds up a crowd and soon the whole place is jumping.

When personal and creative differences threaten to destroy a musical supergroup during the recording of an album, studio guitar player McQueen is brought in to smooth out the tracks. Soon he is reconsidering the direction of his life as he dreams of the elusive brass ring.

A cat named Lorenzo is dismayed to discover that his tail has developed a personality of its own.

A life in one-hundred-sixty-four moments.

This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.

A newspaper reporter and the daughter of an immigrant maintenance man help expose political corruption in New York City.

Set in the future: Two men learn that a mysterious winged girl has been taken prisoner, and then decide that they must free her at any cost.

In this short film by Norman McLaren, dancers enact the Greek tragedy of Narcissus, the beautiful youth whose excessive self-love condemned him to a trapped existence. Skilfully merging film, dance and music, the film is a compendium of the techniques McLaren acquired over a lifetime of experimentation.

In a small village in the hinterland, three stories of love and desire are changing the emotional landscape of its residents. Characters of a romanesque world in which their conceptions of life are limited on one side by human instincts, on the other by a blind and fatalist fate.