Lynn Tomlinson

Never underestimate the power of one voice to change things, as wittily illustrated by 14 artists from around the world in this animated speech by Barack Obama.

A theatrical compilation of new animated shorts, including: The Story of Percival Pilts (Janette Goodey & John Lewis, Australia/New Zealand); Tant de forest (Geoffrey Godet & Burcu Sankur, France); Snowfall (Conor Whelan, Ireland); The Ballad of Holland Island House (Lynn Tomlinson, U.S.); Behind the Trees (Amanda Palmer and Avi Ofer, U.S.); We Can't Live Without Cosmos (Konstantin Bronzit, Russia); Messages Dans L'Air (Isabel Favez, Switzerland); Stripy (Babak Nekooei & Behnoud Nekooei, Iran); Ascension (Thomas Bourdis, Martin de Coudenhove, Caroline Domergue, Colin Laubry & Florian Vecchione, France); Love In The Time of March Madness (Melissa Johnson and Robertino Zambrano, U.S. & Australia); World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt, U.S.)

An old farm dog recounts the true tale of Old Bet, the elephant at the start of the American circus. Their mournful melody is hand-crafted using painterly clay-on-glass and oil pastel animation.

"Ten Degrees of Strange" is a music video based on a song by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, from the album Lost in the Cedar Wood, directed and animated by Lynn Tomlinson. Taking inspiration from The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient story written on clay tablets, and responding to the strangeness of the global pandemic, this story of loss and hope in nature is told through colorful, shifting, changing, morphing clay on glass animation.

I Am A Traister: The Sarah Moskovitz Story is an animated film made by teens that tells the story of an unsung hero now in her 90s. In 1980s Los Angeles, Sarah Traister Moskovitz and her colleague Flo Kinsler founded the first Child Survivors of the Holocaust therapy and support group which went on to be a worldwide phenomenon. For the first time this generation of child survivors, then in their 40s and 50s, could name their experience, find community and begin to heal. Now in their 80s and 90s, these survivors consider themselves to be "phantom siblings" with Sarah as their "mother." The film was created by teens who worked with an artist mentor over Zoom, using their phones as cameras and cardboard boxes as animation stands. It is a production of The Righteous Conversations Project, a collaboration of Holocaust survivors and teens, based in Los Angeles and now in its tenth year.

Clay-on-glass under-the-camera animated interpretation of Emily Dickinson's poem by animator Lynn Tomlinson.

Animated clay paintings tell the true story of the last house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay, a large and important estuary and waterway in Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States. In an Old-Time Music ballad, the house sings of its life and the creatures it has sheltered during its lifetime journey from tree, to timber, to home, to an ultimate return to nature. It contemplates time, environmental change, and the rise of the seas.

Mountain Nocturne is a hand-crafted fulldome animation created with modeling clay, delicately manipulated frame by frame so it moves like a living oil painting. Set in the Colorado mountains at night, the film unfolds as a looping meditation on natural cycles. Snow glimmers under moonlight, animals snooze in their dens, flames flicker and reflect on trees, and the landscape breathes between winter and spring. In the dome’s darkness, shifting textures of clay evoke the quiet pulse of the mountains beneath the stars.

Animated film by Lynn Tomlinson.