There is something viscerally nightmarish about Harry Everett Smith’s animated Heaven and Earth Magic.  Watching it now, it’s difficult not to think of Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python, but as Smith’s movie unfolds you slowly get lost in his strange and occult world of cut-out forms, shape-shifting, death imagery and an atmospheric soundtrack made up of primal weather noises, ticking clocks and screams.  I’m not sure my years of watching horror movies and David Lynch are colouring my view, however, I’ve always found Gilliam more frightening that funny – there’s something dislocating about the use of old photographs in animation – but here unsettling the viewer is clearly the intention. In this way, Smith’s film becomes an update (and a subversion) of Méliès – replacing spectacle with subtext.

I don’t know what this film means. I’ve got a feeling that each frame is filled with a rich tapestry of occult symbolism, but I simply don’t have the road-map to allow me to navigate through them. Instead, all I can be is an observer, appreciating the depth even though I can’t see down to the bottom of it.

Watch in a double bill with  A Trip to the Moon (1902).