If you got higher than you’ve ever been in your whole life and then tried to draw all of your childhood memories on a series of Post-It Notes, the results might look a little something like Mariusz Wilczyński’s “Kill It and Leave This Town,” a psychotropic vision quest through the animator’s own past that blurs the living and the dead into a bittersweet orgy of squiggles and undefinable sadness. So lo-fi that it makes Don Hertzfeldt look like Walt Disney, Wilczyński’s hallucinatory opus appears as if sketched out in about 15 minutes, but its autodidactic writer/director actually worked on the film for more than 15 years; the process took so long that several of Wilczyński’s collaborators died along the way,…

Polish animator Mariusz Wilczynski has created a striking film with dreamlike qualities for his feature-length debut Kill It and Leave This Town. It's a remarkable debut from an artist who has previously created shorts, and it's series of scenes are made up from a procession of often monstrous and avant-garde vignettes which seem excavated from the darkest and unprocessed cavities of his subconscious. 

Wilczyński's memories, or more aptly labelled nightmares, finds him revisiting childhood experiences in the city of Łódź during the nineteen sixties where he nurtured a safe land of memories, populated with deceased friends and family. Cruelties were still commonplace in the country which was still struggling to emancipate itself from its modern past; at the same time…

My favorite dreams are those most deeply rooted in my memories. It's wonderful to relive, reform, and reimagine that which I have tangibly experienced, savoring the feeling of lucid reminiscence that can never be experienced in my waking life.

Dreams are fickle, however, and can quickly turn from absolute euphoria into an abject nightmares. I have never felt discomfort so great as when the memories I cherish most, those protected in the pure shell of nostalgic remembrance, quickly go off the rails into demented forms, casting the warmth of my lived experience into a surreal hell that I am psychologically wired to escape from.

I lack control over my dreams, but I can certainly rationalize the feelings they inspire when…

Almost unbearably sad. This is clearly a very personal film for director Mariusz Wilczyński, who spent 14 years working on this project as a way of reckoning with the deaths of close family members and friends. But the film's singularity and sometimes impenetrable symbolism doesn't make it any less powerful – there are moments in this that are absolutely heartbreaking, and I know they'll haunt me for a long time.

The animation is idiosyncratic, often grotesque and at times totally gorgeous, with sparing use of colour to devastating effect. (David Ehrlich of course grossly undersells the film's visual style in his characteristically glib review which is only worth reading if you want to roll your eyes in disgust.) It depicts…

An inexplicably beautiful and visceral film that lets us see the filmmaker wade through a sea of memories of himself, his parents, and his childhood town, in a gorgeous animation that doesn't hold your hand at all. Likely not for people who want a straight-forward narrative, but for those looking for a personal, dark, and possibly incomprehensible experience. This premiered at Berlinale some six months ago and as soon as I saw the poster and trailer I knew I had to watch the rest of Wilczyński's shorts and keep an eye out for the feature release. His style is so unique and delightful despite the grim tones it can bring with it, and it's somewhat exactly the style I would…

"And you'll finally let me say something about you: now I'm so close to you. And forgive me, because I never tell you this sort of thing. I can always count on you: when I'm in need, overcome by pain and anxiety; when something frightens me. You make no demands you ask nothing of me; and I, in turn, demand and ask nothing of you: because I know that this selflessness makes for the purest of friendships. You're always there for me."

A nostalgic and sentimental yet grotesque animation about the conversations you wish you could have with those people that you loved so much who have passed. It's about trying not to miss the moment to follow through and…

20 Animated films challenge

[Film #4 from Poland]

Would love to go back in time to live in this eerie town for a day or two. After a while, I have to do the same thing suggested in the title.

Kill It and Leave This Town is a haunting waltz on delusional life in a 60s Polish town. Film forms a hallucinatory mosaic around — bitter lives of people living there. One will either find comfort in hallucinatory endless nights or will be infuriated by ambiguous narrative. Artwork layout has a peculiar original style in its poetic surrealism. Some caricatures are so sharp, the wound it creates on viewer is difficult to undo. While animation is essentially 2D repulsive scribblings,…

with the omnipresent psychological attrition of the Big Commercial Holiday approaching, what better time to fuck your mind with a phantasmagoric trip into the recesses of your most dark and unfathomable dreams, the shapeless parts of your mind that act with more base and primal urges?

merry fucking Christmas, dickshitters! it’s gonna be one of those! 

there’s something about the unreality of Eastern Europe, Polish, post-Soviet animations that expresses a certain minimalist brutalism, not like American animations where everything is colorful and delightful and immersed in fluid movement and wide-doe-eyed heroes and heroines.

no, this kind of animation expresses one thing; a flat, hostile world, devoid of implicit meaning, seeking only to either subjugate or annihilate you. and there is…

20 Animated films challenge

[Film #4 from Poland]

Would love to go back in time to live in this eerie town for a day or two. After a while, I have to do the same thing suggested in the title.

Kill It and Leave This Town is a haunting waltz on delusional life in a 60s Polish town. Film forms a hallucinatory mosaic around — bitter lives of people living there. One will either find comfort in hallucinatory endless nights or will be infuriated by ambiguous narrative. Artwork layout has a peculiar original style in its poetic surrealism. Some caricatures are so sharp, the wound it creates on viewer is difficult to undo. While animation is essentially 2D repulsive scribblings,…