Manipulate 2025: From La Fantasmagorie’ to the Future Reviewed

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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 the second of these now that the dust’s settled, From La Fantasmagorie’ to the Future, a batch of shorts that took the viewer into strange new worlds on the edge of imagination, and beyond.

On the Edge Reviews

Fantasmagorie‘

– The First Cartoon: Despite the limitations of animation in 1908, there’s a timeless sense of creativity and unleashed imagination to Émile Cohl’s captivating line drawing in motion.
– Fever-Dream sensibilities: Figures morph into objects into animals and back again, the world around them dissolving and reforming with fluid grace. I found myself thinking of Old-Spice’s immortal ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like‘ advertising campaign.
– Fantasmagorical: Ultimately this short animation lives up to its title and more. You’ll want to watch it again just to make sure you capture its full, fantastical journey.

Night on Bald Mountain (Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve)

– Genuinely Terrifying: Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker’s 1933 shifting shadow world of witches, warlocks, ghouls and undead horses is not something to watch before bedtime.
– Captivating: You may have seen Disney’s take on Modest Mussorgsky’s evocative piece, but this haunting tale preceded Fantasia by 7 years and is easily as impressive, explaining less and showing more.
– Mind-boggling: Unless an adept of the animated arts, you will continually ask yourself ‘how did they do that?’

The Girl and the Cellist (La Demoiselle et le violoncelliste)

– Shades of Monty Python: Plucked from 1965 Jean-François Laguionie’s absurdist tale has a stop-motion animated artwork style reminiscent of the Python’s later offerings, though the art is bespoke and not adapted.
– Surreal but complete: The progressively more fantastical experiences of the Cellist and The Girl begins as a rescue, before evolving into something more like Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
– Quaint: There’s something terribly polite about this short, from the simple solo-cello soundtrack to our heroes’ interactions with stormy seas, giant crabs, and crowded beaches. Is it charming? Perhaps.

Monsieur Pointu

–Oscar-Nominated – in 1976, André Leduc and Bernard Longpré’s stop-motion short almost won a statuette for this story of one musician’s continuing attempts to capture and play his flighty violin.
–Total Fun – There’s nothing deep, dark or meaningful here, just a talented musical entertainer combining a clownish sensibility with a progressively more ambitious exercise in animated possibilities.
– Not a story per say – whilst the short is fun, and undeniably impressive, it can feel more like a technical exercise than a purposeful work of art.

Borderline 1&2

– Satire, satire, satire: Monique Renault’s 1981 shorts have the feel of Private Eye cartoons come to life, taking aim at workplace equality, ‘boys and their toys’.
– Accessible Feminism: There’s no arguing with Borderline 1’s assertion that business success comes easier without domestic obligations and the absurdity of material obsession.
– Message over medium: Whilst the subtexts for the shorts are clear, the animation here is a means to an end, rather than a discipline being exploited to the full

Blind Vaysha (Vaysha de l’Agule)

– Fairytale style: Moving the collection into the 2010’s, Theodore Ushev’s story of a little girl with one eye seeing only the past, the other, the future, is beautifully animated in Ushev’s distinctive encaustic style.
– No fairy-tale story: The short explores Vaysha’s predicament and all of its varyingly awful consequences, but finds no hope of unification of humanity’s view of past and present.
– Thought-provoking but incomplete: Whilst well-structured, and engaging, Ushev’s unwillingness or inability to find a conclusion asks a question, and leaves it there.

Symbiosis

– Fully Cinematic: Nadja Andrasev’s story of one wife’s progressively more complicated investigation of her husband’s hectic extra-marital sex life enjoys an authoritative voice and a deep, and oddly meditative sensibility.
– Natural History: Life abounds in this short film, whether insectoid, found in a zoo, or a sex club. The heroine adopts a character someplace between a detective and David Attenborough, the pull of her investigation irresistible to the viewer.
– Non-prescriptive: Beautifully animated through a seamless blend of techniques, it’s a compelling watch, though precisely how you interpret proceedings remains a highly personal matter.

Machini

– Commanding: Congolese animator Frank Mukunday’s stop-motion world of stones, scrap metal, natural materials and chalk drawings tells a simple but weighty story of humanity’s subjugation by industrial capitalism.
– Visually arresting: The sense of natural items being brought to life only to be exterminated by relentless pollution and exploitation drives home the short’s call to action.
– Universal: Though rooted in the mining-blighted story of the city of Lubumbashi, there’s no question of Machini’s broad relevance to everyone living everywhere.

Windshriek (Hurlevent)

– Thrilling: Frederic Doazan brings the letters and words within a book to adventurous life, propelled by the wind like the most ferocious flipbook ever made.
– Game-like feelings: There’s an inescapable feeling of a sidescrolling platform game to the film. However, whilst ‘Word creatures’ come to life and battle for supremacy in ever more momentous conflagrations, precisely what story is being told is never quite clear.
– Energy: There’s an immense dynamism to this animation which powers the short through 6 minutes of breathless action.

Papillion

– Impressionist: Florence Miailhe brings the story of Jewish champion swimmer Alfred Nakache to life in a fluidly animated impressionist painting of a short film.
– Heartfelt: There’s no doubting the earnest exploration of a life so blighted by the Nazi atrocity, nor the attempt to capture the subject’s entire life, including the joys, and not only the miseries.
– Value added?: Whilst noble, one has to ask whether an animated, somewhat abstracted telling of Nakache’s life brings something new to our perceptions of the man.

A Lively Addition to Manipulate 2025

From Fantasmagorie’s seminal contribution to Machini‘s awesomely devastating originality, From La Fantasmagorie’ to the Future certainly brought something wild and unique to Manipulate 2025. With the festival now wrapped, this strand stood alongside On the Edge and Queer Stories suggesting Edinburgh’s week of visual daring hit was precisely that.

Featured Image: Still from La Fantasmagorie’ (1908)

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

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