ackstasis
Gerald McDermott's 'Sun Flight (1966)' has a very distinctive (and very 1960s) visual style, but it wasn't really my cup of tea. Certainly, the director's use of colour is vibrantly expressive, with the characters' silhouettes set against breathtaking backgrounds of ochre and deep-red. The characters themselves are drawn to resemble primitive wall etchings, the sort you might find on the inside of an Ancient Egyptian (or Greek, in this case) tomb. The illusion of movement is created by fading successive images into each other, producing a sort of "strobe effect" that I found a little distracting. Also, not being particularly well- educated in Ancient Greek mythology, I had difficulty following the story; at the very least, I now know why the Sun-bound spaceship in 'Sunshine (2007)' was named "Icarus." A little research helped clarify the narrative: Daedalus was a skilled craftsman who, along with his son Icarus, was locked in a tower to keep secret his knowledge of the Labyrinth, an impossible maze Daedalus produced to hold King Minos' Minotaur (a half-man, half-bull being). For the two of them to escape, Daedulus fashioned pairs of feathered wings, but Icarus flew too close to the Sun, his wings melted, and he fell dead into the ocean.
