Phantom Canyon, a film by Stacey Steers

Phantom Canyon (2006) is another short animated film by Stacey Steers where many of the backgrounds and other details are collaged pieces from old engravings. There are so many of these films by Steers and older directors like Lawrence Jordan that I’m starting to think they should be considered a sub-genre inside the general body of film animation, just as engraving collage is almost a separate class of paper collage. In Stacey Steers’ The Edge of Alchemy the human character was animated from repurposed footage of Janet Gaynor and Mary Pickford. For this earlier film the humans have been borrowed from Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering motion studies. Muybridge is popular with animators for the obvious reason that his photographs were early forms of film animation (or cinema) in themselves; his photo experiments are even the subject of at least two animated films: Le Cheval de Fer (1984) by Gérald Frydman, and Muybridge’s Strings (2011) by Koji Yamamura. In Phantom Canyon a Muybridge…