Night on Bald Mountain (1933)

In 1933, Alexandre Alexeieff invented the pinscreen method of animation, a tecnique which consists of a white screen pierced by hundreds of thousands of pins that can slide back and forth, each in its own hole.
After two years of work, Alexeïeff, with the help of his wife Claire Parker, completed Night on Bald Mountain. This short animation is based on Noch' na lïsoy gore (Night on Bald Mountain), a fantasy for orchestra composed by Modest Mussorgsky and arranged by Rimsky Korsakoff. The piece is performed by The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert Coates.
Another inspiration for this work was the pointillism of Seurat. Alexeieff, in his work, combinined sensibilities at once surrealist and classical, ancient and modern.

Night on Bald Mountain has much affinity to Walt Disney's evocation of the same Moussorgsky work in Fantasia (1940). While Disney's Fantasia used cell animation in a direct and explicit way, the power of Alexeieff's work derives from the extraordinary versatility that he and Claire Parker brought to their unusual medium. Their technique is most closely akin to the music that they visualize in their manipulation of time and space through shadowy referents. The description of both sight and sound is dark and lyric. There are unexpected harmonies between visual and musical images and the tonalities are always elastic and balanced. Animation and music become metaphorical equivalents to one another. Through a suite of immaginative pictures and metamorphosis, they narrate a tragicomic story of life and death.
Unfortunately, the distributors objected that the only way to make a profit was to produce a dozen films every year. Alexeieff and Parker, therefore, left art and cinema to turn to advertising.
You can buy the dvd Animation Works of Alexander Alexeieff and the book Alexeieff.