Manipulate 2025: On the Edge Films Reviewed

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The Quinntessential Review, Feb 21, 2025 – Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival 2025 lit up the city from 1st to 9th February, delivering a bold blast of visual theatre, puppetry, and animated film that left its mark. Produced by Manipulate Arts, this year’s lineup dove headfirst into boundary-pushing storytelling, with its film strand—a triple bill of On the Edge, Queer Stories, and The Feminine Gaze—stealing the show.

We’ve tackled all three now that the dust’s settled, starting with On the Edge, a batch of shorts that wrestled with psychological, physical, and emotional extremes. From Sweden’s green debates to a salmon’s human guise, here’s a stripped-down look at how the first nine landed.

On the Edge Reviews

The Power Grid
– Educational video vibes: The mix of still photography and simple animation coupled with somewhat erudite narration makes this essay on renewable energy feel like something watched from behind a desk whilst fiddling with your pencil case.
– Sparks interest: The increasingly personal critique subverting the typical ‘renewable energy – good’ narrative raises timely questions as to the winners and losers in Sweden’s green revolution.
– Disjointed: The switch from quasi-documentary to denunciation is a touch jarring and comes a little too late for Clara Bodén’s video essay to feel like a finished article.

Freeze Frame
– Striking visuals: This highly polished stop-motion animation offers a chilly, greyscale world of anonymous workers tirelessly labouring to harvest ice doomed to melt.
– Mesmeric: The rhythmic quality of motion and sound creates a clockwork sensibility as ice is sawn free, hauled out, and dragged into storage, complete with all manner of beasts dancing within its chilly depths.
– Thought-provoking: Soetkin Verstegen’s cunningly realised short is a playful and imaginative meditation on humanity’s perpetual dance between preservation and its ultimate futility.

Time of the Slime Mould
– Repetitive: Leena Pukki’s seemingly endless footage of Petri dishes and sped-up Slime Mould growth is competently captured but ceases to surprise very quickly.
– Obscure: The juxtaposition of the Slime Mould’s capillary-like films with textile patterns doesn’t immediately spark the imagination.
– Deceptively shallow: The quasi mantra-esque voice-over talking of time and decay fails to advance any meaningful or particularly original thesis.

Without Us
– Accomplished animation: Oslo-based True Fiction’s wordless exploration of a world suddenly sans-humanity has a rotoscopic quality which lends life to its wild animals amidst decaying urban jungles.
– Impactful colours: Director Julie Engaas’s post-human vision renders verdant growth in a vibrant, almost heroic green, contrasting with the fading hues of moth-eaten garments.
– Anti-climactic: Having created a world where broken windows invite life inside, the choice to end proceedings with a red dress dancing beneath the waves pins the viewer’s mind on the ghost of lost humanity, rather than what’s to come after.

Flood
– Gorgeous: Amanda Strong’s First Nation’s inspired 2017 story of Thunder, creation of the Spider-woman and champion against the lies of colonisers is spun out of wonderfully textured shadow puppetry.
– Enchanting: There’s a lovely cadence to the storytelling, and a willingness to show and not tell which holds the viewer’s attention.
– Doesn’t stick the landing: Though this short animation finds its ending – as with so many good tales – in its beginning, an abrupt shift in animation style and messaging breaks the spell so that it clunks a little.

Inner Polar Bear
– Wonderful narration: Director Gerald Conn’s sand animation benefits immensely from Maxine Peake’s gentle yet powerful narration of Jeanette Winterson’s poetic & primal tale of climate change and Ursa Maritimus.
– Accessible philosophy: There’s a synergy between the shifting impermanence of the medium and the idea of a fragile world and mutable spirits.
– Potentially divisive: How much the short speaks to the individual relies on their willingness to embrace the ‘inner polar bear’ symbolism without getting caught up in the practical implications.

Glenn, the Great Nature Lover
– Whimsical: Whimsy is often attempted but seldom as well realised as in Anna Erlandsson’s charmingly barmy critique of humanity’s consumerist relationship with the natural world.
– Complete: In essence, a singular joke followed through to its logical and merrily horrible end, the story capers along without hesitation, repetition or deviation.
– Memorable: It looks as if it may have been animated in MS Paint, which only emphasises this short’s waggish charms.

Acca
– Emotionally flat: Erik Torefeldt’s degree project animation follows an anthropomorphic acorn’s doomed efforts to maintain its flower bed and feels very much like a technical exercise rather than a passion project.
– Stock Visual Quality: It can be hard to escape a generic feel when working with Blender, and escape velocity is not reached between the oddly textured main character’s skin and the rather austere landscape.
– Inaccessible: The short is intended to be about the climate crisis, but the minimalist approach leaves the story obscured for anyone who hasn’t read the programme notes.

Wild Summon
– Effective: This quasi-natural history short follows the complete lifecycle of a salmon in human-diver form, a switch that could be gimmicky and alienating but which proves itself a gripping subversion of the genre.
– Impressive: The seamless combination of photorealistic animation and live filming coupled with Marianne Faithfull’s throaty but passionate narration creates a complete cinematic experience.
– Purposeful discomfort: Creators Karni Arieli and Saul Freed manage to present the salmon’s experience of a human-controlled world without hyperbole or excessive cynicism, leaving the viewer with only the uncomfortable truth.

A Lively Kick-Off to Manipulate 2025

From The Power Grid’s green rethink to Wild Summon’s salmon odyssey, On the Edge made a cracking addition to Manipulate Festival 2025’s film programme, showing animation’s knack for unsettling, enchanting, and lingering in style. With the festival now wrapped, this strand stood alongside Queer Stories and From ‘La Fantasmagorie’ to the Future proving Edinburgh’s week of visual daring was daring indeed.

Featured Image: Still from ‘Still Game’.

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Manipulate Festival 2025 ran 1st-9th February across Edinburgh. For more, visit manipulatearts.co.uk.

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