This is what happens when you let animation think instead of just move. Orikasa builds a language out of shape and sound that language itself can't reach, following Michaux's mescaline descent into territories where words stop working. Watch it once to see the poem. Watch it twice to understand that the animation is the poem.
A poet's experience of altered consciousness becomes an animated short about language and perception. Japanese filmmaker Ryo Orikasa draws on Henri Michaux's book of poetry and drawings of the same name, in which Michaux recorded his time under mescaline. Rather than telling a conventional story, the film tests how far words and perception can go, building links between sound, meaning, shapes and movement. Tony Robinow provides an intense voiceover, and the poems trace the human mind out toward estrangement at one extreme and transcendence at the other. The result carries Michaux's writing past the printed page and into moving images.
