Artist Allison Schulnik makes traditional claymation and stop-motion films that flow between strangely pretty and somewhat sickening. Her previous clip set to Scott Walker was trippy. Her newest Eager is somewhat of an opus. It starts off minimally, with expressively choreographed, stringy, ghoul-like figures, and then blooms to complete forests of insane flowers, their centers gaping and flapping and morphing into skulls and unsettlingly flexing orifices. Then, back to the ghouls, flanked across a mutant horse, clopping through the immaculate landscape, before dissolving again until very visceral and alien formations gyrate, like organs spilling and slurping themselves back into the clay.
Oh, it’s still clay, still stop-motion. Though this 8 minute clip features some of Schulnik’s most complex animation to date, the process is visible — the brush-strokes of indentations riddling the surfaces, the mushed spirals of colors, even the clearly finger-tip-sized craters. Music by Aaron M. Olson.
