Animation NOW! Invert – Places 

When nothing seems real, everything seems possible. One of animation’s greatest party tricks is the licence it gives artists to invert every rule of reality. In this, animation rapidly leaves behind the gravity-bound confines of the stage, and even the more flexible realities of live action cinema.

It takes a special kind of eye to look at something and turn it inside out in a way that seamlessly transports the meaning of the narrative – and the attention of the audience – into an unrecognisable and yet thoroughly engaging place.

This programme is a veritable cornucopia of the most inspired and inventive of these animated worlds. Finity Calling, a hyper-stylised chamber piece with puppets, represents stop-motion animation at its most painstaking and otherworldly. Fluctuating between the underwater and the above, boundaries become slippery in the trippy and tactile Spermaceti. And in the wonderfully messy Pura Vida, bright and chaotic animation captures the giddy sensations of an out-of-control vacation.

These are places that could only be dreamed and depicted within the realm of animation. Everything seems possible when nothing seems real.