User Reviews

SCIANY is a very, very hard film to explain, as its plot is pretty much incomprehensible. Instead of telling any sort of traditional narrative, the story is pretty much irrelevant, as the focus is really on the art.

The film is very dark, as the artwork consists of cross-hatched drawings that look much more like works of art instead of animation. It's very moody, but also very nicely done. It consists of a naked bald man and is life inside a large room. However, given the surreal nature of the film, the room is bizarre--with drawers that magically appear and disappear in the walls. In addition, you eventually learn that the bald guy is living inside a box and either he must be very tiny or the people outside are enormous.

Overall, the film is like a stream of consciousness and not a story. It is lovely to look at and trying to make sense of it all might just result in your brain exploding. But don't worry--there's really no need to try and its best to just take it all in and accept it for what it is.

By the way, Dumala's later work is even more refined and artistic--such as his darkly brooding FRANZ KAFKA.

Damn these walls... To look at, this extremely sepulchral eight minute grim work of art could be a glimpse into a cold endless mournful nightmare, or a sunless vision of hell. Its spare yet fiercely melancholy and haunting visuals which are mostly composed of shadowy gloom and surreal imagery, are very eerie and reminded me of the look of the good Hellraiser movies. To me its main driving theme seemed to be that of the effects on the fragile human mind of imprisonment and of being condemned to the oppressive claustrophobic isolation of maddening darkness. Its setting is either a Gothic prison or a very inhumane ward in an insane asylum. It's true that it doesn't have any real story and that its meaning is hazy and unclear, but that doesn't matter when the animation is so striking and in its own morbid way, beautiful. I loved it, it was so murky and the style of the animation was so different and enchanting, it was like it was etched out of stone. Really excellent work, a very distinct artistic vision that was definitely right up my street. Let me out!!!

This animation seems to try to give view of the incomprehensible experiences of a deranged man.

Things like a fly crawling beneath his skin, emerging from it and then re-entering -all without his objection- suggest just how twisted his mind has become.

At first blush I thought the film was describing life inside a mental institution from the viewpoint of one of its more disturbed patients. The footsteps he hears seem to be those of a doctor coming to check up on him. The sound of the coin might be the eye-slot on the door being closed just before the doctor switches off the light, probably at the end of the day, not out of malice.

Definitely not easily digestible fare but interesting.

"Sciany" or "Walls" is an 8-minute short film from 1988, so almost 30 years old already. The writer and director here is Piotr Dumala which tells film connoisseurs that the genre here is animation. Dumala was in his early 30s when he made this one, yet it's not one of his earliest works. If you know the filmmaker a bit, you also know that he usually has a creepy spooky approach on animation and this is also very true here. Finally we have an original work from him here, but I would not say that it's a better watch than his adaptations. The film certainly delivers in terms of atmosphere, soundtrack and sound effects, but it's once again not a particularly good achievement in terms of storytelling. The absence of dialogues may be a good thing for non-Polish viewers, but also it takes away even more from the (lack of a) story. I personally have to give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended and here we have a good example of style over substance.