Blinkity Blank (1955) is an animated short film (five minutes) directed by Norman Mc Laren and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
It doesn't have a story. It is, literally, five minutes of bouncing squiggles against a solid black background. While it doesn't have a story, certain images are repeated: sometimes the squiggles are a bird, sometimes they're an egg which appears to hatch a bird. There is also a repeated suggestion of cages, as if the bird is trying to break out from a cage.
For this film McLaren, who tended towards abstract and avant-garde animation over anything resembling a plot, chose to draw his squiggles directly onto film stock. When this proved too labor-intensive (a five-minute movie would have required over 7,000 drawings), McLaren simply started skipping frames, producing a stroboscopic effect that only increased the strangeness of his cartoon.
See it for yourself on the NFB's Youtube channel
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Tropes:
- Creative Closing Credits: Creative opening credits. As the names appear onscreen, each word or name in turn blinks in time with the soundtrack.
- Deranged Animation: A free-form animation style in which random squiggles form and re-form into different shapes. Jagged lines. Explosions like fireworks. Birds. Eggs. Umbrellas.
- Line Boil: As McLaren was drawing each frame by hand line boil was produced, an effect that was only strengthened by skipping frames which made the images constantly blink in and out of existence.
- Mickey Mousing: The shapes morph and move in time with the free-form jazz improvisation by musician Maurice Blackburn.
- Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: Animation stripped down to its absolute minimum, with shapes bouncing around to a soundtrack.
- Minimalism: Shapes continually appearing and disappearing and morphing into other shapes, on a black background.
- No Plot? No Problem!: No story, as is typical of McLaren work, although there are suggestions of a bird hatching out of an egg and escaping from a cage. That doesn't explain what the umbrellas are for, though.
