Heaven and Earth Magic


Heaven and Earth Magic is a 1962 American avant-garde cutout animation film directed by visual artist, filmmaker and mystic Harry Everett Smith.

Plot

Heaven and Earth Magic centers on an unnamed heroine, whose journey after the loss of a "very valuable watermelon", results in various bizarre situations including a visit to the dentist, being transported to heaven, and return to earth after being "devoured by Max Müller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London".

Reception

Fred Camper from Chicago Reader praised the film's artistic style, calling it "a mysterious world of alchemical transformations in which objects suggest a multitude of possibilities." Time Out Magazine offered the film similar praise, comparing it to the works of Max Ernst and Georges Méliès.

Legacy

It is listed in the film reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, noting the film as director Smith's magnum opus, and saying "Incomplete, deeply idiosyncratic, rearranged from materials taken largely from an earlier period —a Victorian-era catalogue— it is explicitly "folk" in nature."

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