Dark Toons

Hello, my name is ARTURO, and I guess to be a carillon.

Animation by Merijn Hos in collaboration with Jurriaan Hos for Dutch music festival Down the Rabbit Hole, 2019. The film was created using a combination of both live-action and animation techniques. The set was styled with locally sourced props from secondhand stores which were then combined with animation and photography.

The entire history of Japanese Animation, in celebration of 100 years of Japanese Animation.

As celestial beings descend to Earth vitiating its population, the world’s order unbalances. Initiated by these terms, a tragic fall leads to the parturition of crucial opposites: Hell and Heaven’s circles.

The wind blows and browse through the book of the alphabet creatures.

An official selection at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Toronto International Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival, "The Magnificent Cake!" is an unforgettable work of stopmotion animation exploring the bitter milieu of Belgium-occupied Congo. In the late 19th century, keen to compete with other European imperial powers on the continent, King Leopold II of Belgium proclaimed, “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” The subsequent occupation of the Congo would come to attract a contingent of servants, merchants and miscellaneous bourgeois driven by everything from insatiable greed to existential fear. From the intimate stories of these characters -- many of whom pass through a luxury hotel in the middle of the jungle – emerges a greater narrative concerning the imperialist mentality. In a film by turns surreal, darkly comic and brutal, directors Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef ultimately turn their critical gaze on the colonists themselves in a work of stunning, mysterious beauty.

A sudden meeting of a Man and a Woman begins a hypnotic act – a game of pleasure and discomfort.