Eine Murul | Breakfast on the Grass (2011)

NOTE: This Monday short was originally posted on August 13, 2018. We are re-uploading Peter Hemminger's original Monday Shorts until further notice.

In 1988, Estonian animator Pritt Pärn created one of his masterpieces, Breakfast on the Grass. Inspired by Manet's classic painting, the film used the image as a springboard for four intertwining stories, pointing out the absurdity and dissatisfaction of life in the Soviet union.

Thirty-three years later, four of Pärn's students put their own spin on the painting, and although it is considerably less cutting, it's masterful in its own peculiar way. Animators Erik Alunurm, Mihkel Reha, Mari-Liis Rebane and Mari Pakkas' film is four minutes of perfect prat-falls and nauseous wobbles, set to the soaring strains of Bolero. It isn't easy to make stop-motion puppetry look this loose, but the results are hypnotic and hilarious. One of the Vimeo comments describes it as "one of the most important stop motion films of our time" and I'm not sure if they're joking, but I would tend to agree.