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The French comics scene of the early 1970s witnessed the birth of the essential comics magazine Métal Hurlant. The combination of sci-fi, fantasy and horror, always spiced-up with sex and scantily clad women, soon caught on to such a degree that it gave birth to the English version called Heavy Metal, which has inspired an anthology feature film adapting several stories. True to its name, the film is accompanied by music by Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, Cheap Trick and Nazareth. Heavy guitar riffs alternate with an orchestral soundtrack by one of the best known film music composers, Elmer Bernstein. Shortly after its premiere, the film attracted a cult following among comic book lovers and thanks to its blatant campness, it’s also popular among viewers who frequent midnight screenings. Many sequences of the film are made using rotoscoping, which ensures that the movements of characters in scenes with elaborate artistic style are incredibly fluid. The film – like Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which we are also screening in line with the festival’s theme Hear Animation – got a sequel in the magical year of 2000, unsurprisingly named Heavy Metal 2000.

When Mickey Mouse’s popularity started fading in the 1930s, Walt Disney decided to turn the tide and featured Mickey in the short cartoon film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To differentiate it from other animated films, the film was matched with a classical score conducted by Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The idea of matching animation to popular classical music eventually led to the creation of a unique film in which the famous Mickey Mouse is just one of the characters and his adventures with a magical broomstick are accompanied by seven other stories, each featuring a different style of music, theme and narrative method. While Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor accompanies abstract images, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring takes us through a visual history of the Earth’s beginnings. The tale about Mickey’s attempts to master magic is more traditional and is accompanied by music by Paul Dukas, and the interpretation of the famous ballet from the opera La Gioconda is distinctly comical (after all, it is full of more or less graceful performances by hippos, ostriches, elephants and crocodiles). Disney’s intention to create a new kind of entertainment called a concert feature is underlined by the combination of animated sequences with live orchestra and the presence of music critic Deems Taylor, who introduces each animated segment.

This suggestive musical film combining live-action scenes with phenomenal animated sequences ranks among the all-time film classics. Based on the 1979 Pink Floyd album of the same name and a script by Roger Waters, the film was directed by Alan Parker, who significantly altered Waters’ original concept. The film’s main hero is a solitary rock star named Pink, who is locked in his hotel room before a concert. Pink’s bloodstream is filled with drugs and alcohol and his head is filled with memories of the key moments of his life: his fatherless childhood, an overprotective mother, the ruthless education system of the 1950s, a failed marriage and also various fantastic visions and images depicted in the film by Gerald Scarfe’s animations. Meanwhile, Pink’s managers are trying to break into the room and thousands of fans are gathering for the show. The message of the film is nevertheless more general and deals with the senselessness of war and totalitarian regimes and restriction of creative and personal freedom and liberty symbolised by walls that not only surround the main hero from the outside but are also present inside of him. The strong story of this experimental film is driven by organically connected music and imagery and does not feature much dialogue or explanations. After the premiere, the reviewers felt overwhelmed by “ubiquitous imaginativeness”, but otherwise, the film that significantly contributed to tensions within the band, was received positively. For this time and age and this year’s festival theme, the film is as topical as ever.

Thanks to his book about an alternative economic model (Economy for the Common Good) Austrian political activist and also dancer Christian Felber attracted the attention of media and similarly thinking people. In a unique project called Happiness Machine, ten female directors and ten female composers decided to visualise his ideas by means of a varied palette of genres and types of animated film accompanied by music performed by the Viennese chamber orchestra Klangforum. By animating painting, Elizabeth Hobbs depicts the Grimm story about the greedy fisherman and the effects of his avarice on his surroundings, while Vessela Dantcheva chose the form of abstract film. Joanna Kozuch presents the metaphor of acrobats in a music box, Ena Bradner’s film combines pixilation with live action, and Samantha Moore, known for her documentaries, chose the same approach in her film Bloomers, which she drew on textile and which includes authentic testimonies of entrepreneurs from the textile industry. In Andrea Schneider’s film Generator/Operator, we will see stop-motion animation of various products of nature and Ana Nedeljković’s titular film The Happiness Machine exploring corporate practices stars clay puppets stylised as computer game characters. Using 3D animation and other techniques, Rebecca Blöcher portrays natural and artificial environments, while Measuring the Distance by Susi Jirkuff focuses on marginalised social groups and the peripheries they live in. The closing experiment by Michelle Kranot uses archive footage to turn to the past but talks about a current issue. The common feature of this unique showcase is a distinct musical element. In some cases, the films are accompanied by a melodic score with steady rhythm, in other cases by wilder and almost shredded sound compositions.

The titular song of Chomet’s iconic film will undoubtedly carry away every viewer. The tones of the catchy jazz melody bring us the peculiar story of a Tour de France champion and old Madame Souza, who has been taking care of him ever since he was a child. As soon as she discovers his passion for cycling, she decides that he has to be the next Tour de France winner. But what she cannot know is that the French mafia is preparing to execute its plan to kidnap star athletes and use them in the gambling underworld of an overseas city! Madam Souza (and her fat dog Bruno) has no choice but to save her champion. Luckily, she runs into three kind souls that she knows from the screen of her obsolete television. Sylvain Chomet created a caricatural world where the madness around Tour de France corresponds to the size of the cyclists’ calves and where the rotten city offers lots of humorous genre allusions, gags and simple peculiarities for lovers of film, animation and music. The Triplets of Belleville artfully works with rhythm and the meaning of sound not only in its musical scenes, but in the narration itself, which helps to fully paint the unforgettable characters and the mesmerising setting of this film with almost no dialogue.

Tim Burton’s famous musical from 1993 entertains and frightens kids and adults all over the world to this day. The question of how old one should be when first venturing into Halloween Town led by the likeable skeleton Jack Skellington, is discussed on the internet by many parents. How to handle the kidnapping of Santa Claus and what to do with a kind girl named Sally (whose limbs regularly fall off, though) and flying reindeer? The wild imagination of the authors of The Nightmare Before Christmas was inspired by an original poem written by Tim Burton in which the king of terrifying Halloweenland visits a Christmas village and decides that, this year, it will be the people of his putrid village who will organise the peaceful Christmas festivities because, after all these years, Halloween has become quite a bore. And so Jack, ignoring the objections of his beloved Sally, takes on the task with determined effort and commitment… Similar preoccupation with the world of both holidays was shown by the film’s authors who drew inspiration from the work of Edward Gorey and German expressionism when creating the characters and designing the set. Even though the film is also known as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton himself picked Henry Selick (Coraline, 2009) as the director. All viewers fearless enough to watch the film will be safely guided through it by energetic performances of the songs composed by American composer Danny Elfman (The Simpsons, Men in Black, etc.).