Broken screws and dusty puppet eyes

When one sees a Wes Anderson composition or a sweeping Goddard sequence of jump cuts, they are expecting a certain style. This feeling goes beyond directorship and into authorship when we experience something from the Quay Brothers. This largely happens because the Quay Brothers are able to grow the mise-enscène of the film into something that simultaneously is itself and something larger than itself. They are able to expand the frame beyond its edges, and expand its sensations beyond that of sight and sound. To put it simply, when one sees and hears a Quay Brothers film, they know it because they feel as though they can taste, touch, and even smell it.

The Quay Brothers are, perhaps to an extreme few other animators parallel, austere auteurs. The images in their films aren’t traditionally beautiful. They are desaturated and drenched in dust. They stink of mothballs. And let’s be honest, even if we can taste the images in these frames, they’re not delicious.

Beauty here lies in imperfection, and everything in the films points the viewers towards that understanding of beauty. The clean and colourful stop-motion set is replaced with a precise barrenness: aged metallic tools are covered in dust to such a degree that while animating “Streets of Crocodiles” (1986), the animators had to animate the movement and then pause for the dust to settle before capturing the image. A Quay Brothers image is not only seen but also inhaled.

Characters in these films are often unfinished and move with imperfect, jerky movements, which is all their bodies are capable of. These asymmetrical bodies remind viewers of their own aching knees and sloping shoulders. A character moving across the screen is a dusty, visceral pain for the viewer. A grinding of textures like a grinding of bone.

Some of the characters themselves are not human, but instead the detritus of the film’s environment. It seems any object on the screen might be a discarded portion of a deceased character, might at any point either move as a character itself, or might morph into a portion of another character. Existence in these films is precarious and ever-evolving.

Camera movements themselves are almost too fast — re-enacting the struggle to comprehend space and the objects in the space as living or not. Sometimes the movement is so fast a viewer may realize they’ve moved, but not what land they traveled over in the moving.

As in “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, or “This Unnamable Little Broom” (1985), some sets themselves aren’t finished. The horizon line is the abyss itself. Perhaps the characters are stranded. Perhaps this is their entire world. Either way, the unknown is hidden, but its view is in plain sight. A viewer could touch it if they could just find its edge. This unsettled sense of feeling that one cannot feel (or touch) is what exhilarates the viewer of these short, enigmatic films.