We caught up with Chris Sullivan to speak about pushing cinema through the poetics of live performance, the shadow of death, and much more. The film is currently expected to have a fall 2021 premiere, but Sullivan is willing to hold out for as long as it takes to show the film live at festivals and in theaters. It is a mix of live action and animation, and was built around old sound recordings of legendary actor Boris Karloff. He is currently working on his newest feature, The Orbit of Minor Satellites. Sullivan also teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Each character’s past weighs them down within a decrepit environment that envelopes them with a grim color palette. The past is embodied through detailed 2D pencil animation that flows smoothly across the frame. Present time is depicted through grotesquely painted stop-motion paper cutouts that exude a vivid social realism. In a decaying Rust Belt town, a group of down-on-their-luck characters struggle through their solitary existences. His first feature film, 2012’s Consuming Spirits, took 15 years to create. These tense atmospheres amplify the impact of his technique, where perspective and scale can shift at will.

Each space in Sullivan’s work feels like it is on the edge of either disintegration or explosion. Drawn in a fluid, shape-shifting style, his short films - Ain’t Misbehavin! (1981), The Beholder(1983), Master of Ceremonies (1987), and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus(1992) - follow an array of troubled characters: a neurotic priest whose mind is crumbling like the decrepit church he worships in a frothing street preacher who screams the gospel at passersby and skeletons who juggle flaming torches, setting houses ablaze, while a grim reaper stalks the landscape. The Chicago animator discusses distorting space and time in his work and why he hopes his films are like crime scenesĬhris Sullivan is an animator, filmmaker, and performance artist known for his macabre animated films.

The Friend by Christopher X. Sullivan