Reflective Encounters

“Gabriel Böhmer delivers an appealingly wandering animation, where each moment passes by with a mellowed-out pace. Though relaxed in approach, the film is threaded through with meditations on ageing and memory. Like It’s Raining It’s Pouring (also in this programme), photographs are placed around the frame, reminding us that the film might be laced with autobiography. Maps serve a similar function, cut out and fragmented, yet alluding to a real world outside of the fictional. With these visual fragments of reality, Böhmer creates strange metaphors. Moths coming out of cocoons, animated with looping images of maps (the emergence of dormant memories, perhaps?).

The titular gyroscope acts as a back-bone to the ambling narrative. It is an entrance to forgotten memory, making whole again those who have gone. Drawn with careful simplicity, the object has a hieroglyph-like quality. It’s this direct linework which also lends such appeal to the character’s design. Our central protagonist seems to have been produced with a wandering, intuitive pencil. The approach is reminiscent of Ann Course and Paul Clark’s minimalist short Rotting Artist (2002), a similar use of simple lines in animation, even if it’s completely opposite in tone.”

— Chris Childs