DbcultAccessing Vault...
6.1/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 6.1/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Experimental Animation 1933 remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have exactly two minutes to spare and love dusty, hand-made relics, this is absolutely worth your time. 🐵 But if you need things like "plots" or "characters who don't look like they're haunting your closet," you will probably hate it.
This is basically a 1933 pitch tape that failed to get funded. Len Lye built a little marionette monkey, wiggled it in front of a camera, and hoped someone would write him a check.
Nobody did. Which is kind of sad, but watching this, you can sort of see why the suits in 1933 were totally baffled.
The monkey has this incredibly jerky, twitchy movement that feels less like a cute animal and more like a strange bug waking up. It's delightfully weird.
There is this one moment where the monkey just stares directly at the lens. It lingers just a fraction of a second too long, and it's genuinely unsettling in a cool way.
You can tell Lye was just figuring things out as he went. The lighting shifts slightly between frames, probably because he took forever to adjust the puppet between shots and the sun moved outside.
It's obviously not trying to be a grand narrative like The Star Prince. Lye's film is purely a raw, physical test of motion.
Honestly, I love the total imperfection of it. You can practically feel the dust on the film strip and the smell of the hot studio lamps.
It makes you wonder about all the other failed pilots from the 30s that just ended up in trash cans. At least this little guy survived to confuse us on the internet.
Give it a watch if you want a quick hit of pure, unfiltered analog oddness. Just don't expect a masterpiece.