Alice in Not So Wonderland

Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life

Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a better room. No other students arrive and none leave for employment. Johannes is unhappy, imperious, and detached from the school's operation. Lisa is beautiful, at first tightly controlled, then on the verge of breakdown. There's a whiff of incest. Jakob is drawn to Lisa, and perhaps she to him. As winter sets in, she becomes catatonic. Things get worse; Johannes notes that all this has happened since Jakob came. Is there any cause and effect?

The Falls

Told in the form of a mock documentary in 92 short parts, nineteen million people are left obsessed with birds and flight following a strange occurrence. A documentarian analyses the lives of all the survivors whose surnames begin with FALL to uncover the truth behind the event.

Stille Nacht IV: Can't Go Wrong Without You

Short animated film featuring the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You" by His Name Is Alive.

Tales of the Brothers Quay

A compilation of shorts by the Quay Brothers presented as a feature film.

The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.

Anamorphosis

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

Street of Crocodiles

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

In Absentia

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come."

Through the Weeping Glass: On the Consolations of Life Everlasting (Limbos & Afterbreezes in the Mütter Museum)

A documentary on the subject of the collections of books, instruments and medical anomalies at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Mutter Museum housed there. This short film represents the first to be made by the internationally recognized Quay Brothers in the United States. While not a stop-motion animation film, a form for which the Quays are best known, the entire film is vibrantly constructed and 'animated'. Musical score by composer Tim Nelson and voice-over provided by Derek Jacobi.

The Phantom Museum: Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Collection

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities.

The Sandman

One of several collaborative dance films by the Brothers Quay & (dancer, choreographer) William Tuckett. Little enough info around on line, but there's briefly by way of Wikipedia entry. Adapted rather loosely from the works of the E.T.A. Hoffman. Familiar Quays' tropes, much in evidence: automata, trompe l'oeil effects, etc. No credit on the sound design (which is fairly elaborate), tho' that is possibly Larry Sider.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

Dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale.

This Unnameable Little Broom

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

Stille Nacht III: Tales from Vienna Woods

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.

Quay

In 2015, Christopher Nolan curated a selection of short films by the surrealist animators the Quay Brothers to be distributed as a touring 35mm presentation. The three films—"In Absentia" (2000), "The Comb" (1991) and "Street of Crocodiles" (1986)—were accompanied by this brief portrait of the brothers at work in their London studio.

Wonderwood: Comme des garçons

A bird acts as an alchemist in an enchanted forest, selecting different kinds of wood to combine them in a parquet floor.

Corpse Bride

In a 19th-century European village, a young man about to be married is whisked away to the underworld and wed to a mysterious corpse bride, while his real bride waits bereft in the land of the living.

Wolfwalkers

In a time of superstition and magic, when wolves are seen as demonic and nature an evil to be tamed, a young apprentice hunter comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack. But when she saves a wild native girl, their friendship leads her to discover the world of the Wolfwalkers and transform her into the very thing her father is tasked to destroy.

Lissi and the Wild Emperor

The plot concerns a yeti who makes a pact with the devil to kidnap the most beautiful girl in the world. This turns out to be the Princess Lissi, who is clearly the Austrian Princess and later Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria, and much of the film is taken up with subplots related to the court and to the romantic relationship between Elisabeth and her husband. The film is thus a comic parody of the Sissi films.