Animated Beyond

Curated by Zhou Fei, in cooperation with the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

ANIMATED BEYOND demonstrates that animation is far more than the creation of moving drawings or digital figures. It can make social conflicts visible, reconstruct memories, distort political reality, depict psychological states, and subject familiar images from our culture to critical re-examination.
The eight films trace a chronological and aesthetic development: from Daniel Nocke’s biting 3D animation No Place for Gerold and David O’Reilly’s internationally acclaimed digital relationship comedy Please Say Something to the experimental, documentary, and collage-based works of Susann Maria Hempel, Katharina Huber, Ulu Braun, and Mariola Brillowska.
A particularly clear development in German animation of the 21st century is the increasing permeability of the boundaries between animation, documentary film, experimental film, visual art, and video collage. Animation becomes an independent artistic language—a language that not only creates another reality, but also makes the reality in which we live newly visible.

Films
No Place for Gerold 
Daniel Nocke | Germany | 2006 | 5:00 min. | 3D animation
In a shared apartment, an uncomfortable conversation takes place: Gerold the crocodile is supposed to move out. His roommates—a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, and a wildebeest—are not quite sure how to break the news to him gently. What initially appears to be an ordinary roommate conflict develops into a biting and absurd confrontation about living together, belonging, and exclusion.

Please Say Something
David O’Reilly | Germany | 2009 | 10:00 min. | computer animation
In a distant future, David O’Reilly tells, in short fragmented episodes, the story of a complicated relationship between a highly emotional cat and a rather lost mouse. What initially appears to be an absurd variation on a classic animal story develops into a melancholic yet comic reflection on love, communication, dependency, and loneliness in the digital age.

I ride to the edge of the atmosphere in half an hour on my bicycle
Michel Klöfkorn | Germany | 2011 | 10:00 min. | experimental animation
A bicycle, thoughts, lines, words, and images: Michel Klöfkorn’s experimental short film unfolds like a visual stream of consciousness. Fragmented drawings, texts, terms, and symbols initially seem to exist loosely alongside one another, but gradually come together as an associative process of thought.

Seven Times a Day We Complain About Our Fate and at Night We Get Up to Avoid Our Dreams
Susann Maria Hempel | Germany | 2014 | 18:00 min. | experimental animation
Based on interviews with a woman from eastern Germany whose traumatic life story unfolded after she suffered memory loss in 1989, Susann Maria Hempel develops an unusual form of cinematic remembrance.
Ablaze 
Jan Koester & Alexander Lahl | Germany | 2019 | 5:15 min. | animated documentary
When the mayor of a small community in Saxony-Anhalt advocates taking in around 40 refugees, he and his family are met with a wave of hatred and threats.

The Natural Death of a Mouse 
Katharina Huber | Germany | 2020 | approx. 21:30 min. | experimental animation
Katharina Huber’s collage-like animated film follows Anna, a young woman torn between a desire for spiritual and moral self-optimization and doubts about its meaning.

St. Mickeyland
Ulu Braun | Germany | 2023 | 13:00 min. | video collage / experimental animation
Welcome to St. Mickeyland—a surreal reserve where the icons of our media-shaped childhood encounter the contradictory reality of the present.

DESIGN BIO TOILET
Mariola Brillowska | Germany | 2024 | 4:00 min. | animation / experimental film
Mariola Brillowska’s DESIGN BIO TOILET moves between animation, absurd humor, and social observation. With her distinctive visual language, the artist transforms an apparently banal everyday object into a grotesque yet poetic object.