Animation Shorts: Altered States

The End of the End’s striking style, reminiscent of paper cutouts and puppet shows, mythologizes the journey of a recently deceased woman through her final moments with the five senses she used in life. In two ice creams please, inky 2D animation bleeds into stop motion as two increasingly feverish Belgian tourists try to survive in a rainforest after wandering off the path. Fingerbang renders the toxic romance between a lonely woman and a sentient finger in hand-drawn black, white, and red. A bite from an endangered eel leads an unsuspecting scientist toward transformation in the pencil-shaded, earthy interiors of Leptocephalus. The absurd, liminal space of the airport just might be the perfect place to await the apocalypse in the stop-motion animated The End.