the flying fish

Turkish artist Murat Sayginer's animated short, The Flying Fish, is a dazzling achievement of music and visuals. Schematically, the film is a metaphysical journey of life and death with sleek geometric representations--from spheres wriggling sperm-like to a neon-drenched afterlife. Scintillating, metallic textures and imagery abound, juxtaposing the ancient and pure with slick and occasionally glitchy, computerized sheen.

One of the most compelling images was a skeleton hunched within the cage of an overturned shopping cart--an obvious metaphor linking death and consumerism--but the image sticks and is brilliantly evoked in a desert wasteland of scattered bones. Highlight for me in The Flying Fish was the "The Safe Zone" which includes pulsating crystal rectangular bars lit in hyper colors with Sayginer's effective score pumping at shiny synth heights. Riding off into a neon sunset, it becomes a comforting closer to Sayginer's dense menagerie.  ***

-Jeffery Berg