Ghost Cell

Exploding Cell

Like an exercise in animated technique, taking the City of Paris as if it was an animal cell, French filmmaker Antoine Delacharlery builds a kind of virtual anthill where it is possible to see from the Parisian streets trance transit to the Stalingrad subway's station with the passersby coming to life. This animated short film in black and white begins faking a microscope’s zoom, focusing its “cell” with a musical note fading in until it reaches a trance rhythm courtesy of composer Bastien Prevosto. Seems like in this electronic microscope, the filmmaker is adjusting the microscope's diaphragm little by little, in order to be able to see in detail whatever is taking place in this small microorganism.

If at the beginning everything is a little fuzzy, as urban passages define themselves, “Ghost Cell” starts reaching its own rhythm, just like Bastien Prevosto’s music. It is a film that honors its title since images always look like a virtual world that doesn’t seem to be fully constructed, like the halo of a ghost. It’s like watching the edges of an animation that has not been finished, where one can see the outlines, fill them with some unpolished details and leaving those as incomplete structures. It also reflects the visual qualities of an actual cell, with its enzymes and proteins replaced by cars and pedestrians, injecting life to this architectural structure. At some times like an unfinished Wachowski Sisters' “Matrix”, at others like the lines designed for that old video game system in 3D known as Virtual Boy, but with a better definition, the structure evolves until it plays in a style reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's “Inception”, with its buildings unfolding one in top of each other.

There is a smell of video clip in all the matter, specially taking in consideration that the work avoids a narrative and the music is as important as the animation itself. At the end of the day, “Ghost Cell” ends being that enjoyable exercise in style where its mutations know exactly how to evolve, giving the impression that by unfolding like they do, they will know how to enhance their DNA without seeming someone else’s clone.