La Salla

Richard Condie’s unique creatures, motifs, sounds and situations have astonished and delighted audiences and critics around the world for over a quarter of a century. A brilliant animator, he has created a place like none other, filled with apprentices perpetually running into trees, squabbling Scrabble-playing couples, pig birds unleashing strange bugs on Canada, procrastinating pianists and headless boys who are heedless of risk, until it’s too late.

Here, Condie shifts from cell animation to computer-generated animation. Condie calls it “computer animation in opera form. Condie says the film resonates with his temptation to fiddle with the countless options available in computer animation.



In La Salla, the classic tale of temptation is revealed to us in the unique form of a comic opera. We are taken into the world of a character who does as he pleases, mindless of the consequences. In a room full of wind-up toys, he sets a chain of events into motion that ends up disturbing both his own, and the viewer's, sense of reality. Sitting alone in a playroom, our hero is intermittently disturbed by a spectral visitor who holds an apple out to him. When temptation gets the better of him, he is left to suffer the consequences.
Despite the head’s frantic expressions, his torso lights a cannon, rocketing a tiny cow smack in his direction. Nearly frozen with anxiety, the head considers the devastating result, then sings the aria, “Moments ago, I had everything. Now, I have a cow in my nose.”