THE FUSE

There’s an increasingly undeniable hunger for the hand-crafted. As discourse around animation becomes more and more absorbed by anaesthetizing questions about AI, it becomes clearer that people who care about the medium are pushing for tactility and foregrounding real texture, materials imprinted with genuine human feeling. This feels especially true of Sun Xun’s “Magic Atlas,” made over the course of a decade using a refreshingly unrestrained range of different materials and techniques: paint, pen and ink on paper, canvas and newspapers, woodcut, or indeed anything with which the director can bring this strange and dreamlike picture to life.