COMPOUND EYES OF TROPICAL

Combining stop-motion animation with paper hand crafts from traditional Taiwanese funeral culture. And from the perspective of a fly’s compound eyes, shuttle in a mirror-like fluid narrative.

The film’s stop-motion animation puppets are made using Taiwan’s unique papermaking technique rooted in traditional funeral ceremonies. At the beginning of the film, a shadow puppet mirror transforms into a shaman-like animal dancer. The film uses the perspective of a fly to create a montage film language using the metaphor of the compound eye. Through the use of choreography in the style of the Taiwanese ‘yi zhen’ folk dance, the film portrays the Southeast Asian folktale ‘The Mouse-deer Crossing the River’ through multiple perspectives, reinterpreting the story’s multiple facets across cultures.

The audience views the narrative through the vision of the fly’s compound eye, where the folktale represents a form of container, filled with symbolic metaphors such as the mirror and shadows, reflecting the flow of cultural identity, ethnicity and the transitional nature of local and global contexts. The film interprets cultures from around the world, while appearing to be different on the surface, they in fact reveal a similar structure at their core.