Loom is a fantastic animation about a moment that occurs in the fractions of seconds, when a spider attacks a moth. It’s beautiful, dramatic, and poetic. That may seem like jarring adjectives for what looks like an evil horrid spider bearing down on a sweet little moth while overly glitchy noise music clicks around, but bear with me as I explain:
I am normally not a fan of the current fashion of rapid time-remapping in movies. Sometimes it adds to the sense of drama or action, but mostly it’s just gimmicky camera-tricks. I’ll happily forgive Loom’s time-shifting though. The time-shifting allows us to really get into something that takes place in the blink of an eye in the natural world. It also helps us shift our perspective from the trapped moth to the spider herself. After a feint at grabbing her prey, she manages to make her catch. There’s a violent and determined bite, and then a slow embrace as her arms wrap around. And then the really poetic stuff starts.
I mean, has the breakdown of a moth’s organic components and reintegration into a spider’s body ever been rendered with more artistic molecular awesomeness? The attention to biological and molecular detail is matched by the abstracted delight of the concept.
Polynoid has a history of works that celebrate the small scale. They also created 458nm, aka the “biomechanical snail movie”, along with many other works of biomorphic beauty. Mindplotter is another, very keen!
