The Flooded Playground

The Flooded Playground is a digitally composed animated fairy tale about a young child who resides in a house which has a darkly disturbing force that oppresses him in body, mind and spirit. The wallpaper torments him, a malevolent wind deters him from eating, and thorned vines erupt in his bedroom. A sudden cataclysm throws him into a craggy wonderland where he wanders into deep forests and through his inner inferno in a quest to mend his damaged spirit. Thematically, this film is concerned with the amorphous fears, covert brutality, yearnings, and magical thinking of childhood, the resiliency of the human spirit, and the meaning of home.  Lush visual images depict the emotional complexities of childhood - the combination of helplessness and invincibility, sweetness and brutality, and the edge where lines between the real and the imaginary are blurred.

The film was created with a combination of animation styles: stop motion, cutout, drawn and digital effects. The photographic elements of the backgrounds from far flung locations were digitally combined to create the somewhat familiar but undefinable places and times that exist in fairy tales.

Trailer for The Flooded Playground

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"An eerie mix of styles—stop motion, cutout, drawn, and digital—and temporal cadences, this fairy tale about a baby doll's crisscrossing nightmares and waking life feels like a distillation of Svankmajer, Lynch, Polanski, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's wildest dreams. It's not funny but it might take your breath away." 
- Ed Gonzales, Slant Magazine

Director, writer, designer and animator: Lisa Crafts
Music composer and performer: Andrew Barrett
Sound Design: Kelly Spivey, Bill Seery, Alex Noyes
Voice actors: Alva Rogers, Caroline O. Moses
Funded by:
The Jerome Foundation 
New York State Council on the Arts administered through NYFA
©2005 Lisa Crafts    19:48 minutes