Ed Gonzalez, slant magazine, ©2006
In this digitally composed animated fairy tale, a young child resides in a house with a darkly disturbing force that oppresses him in body, mind and spirit. The wallpaper torments him, a malevolent wind deters him from eating, and thorned vines erupt in his bedroom. A sudden cataclysm jolts him into a craggy wonderland where he wanders into deep forests and through his inner inferno
in a quest to mend his damaged spirit.
The Flooded Playground describes the amorphous fears, yearnings, and magical thinking of childhood, the meaning of home and the resiliency of the human spirit. Lush visual images depict the emotional complexities of childhood: the combination of helplessness and invincibility, sweetness
and brutality, and the edge where lines between the real and the imaginary are blurred.
The style of animation is hybrid, consisting of stop motion, cutout, drawn, and digital effects. The photographic elements of the backgrounds were digitally combined with others from far flung locations to create the somewhat familiar but undefinable places and times that exist in fairy tales.
Director, writer, designer and animator: Lisa Crafts
Music composer and performer: Andrew Barrett
Sound Design: Kelly Spivey, Bill Seery, Alex Noyes
Voice actors: Alva Rogers, Caroline O. Moses
Funded by:
The Jerome Foundation
New York State Council on the Arts administered through NYFA
©2005 Lisa Crafts 19:48 minutes