Len Lye used to say that his movies were attempting to reflect the way the brain works. I guess not many people are interested on the working of the brain. Specially those who don't want theirs to work. To keep with the food metaphors both of you have made, I'd say that, for me, abstract scratch film is like putting a whole bag of exploding candy dust inside your mouth and then filling it with soda and shaking it until it feels like your teeth are melting. If you don't why it's so great, it's because you're way too old to live. Not to mention that scratching film is getting more and more rare and difficult to do in this digital world. I've simulated the effect on the computer, but it's not fun at all. It's cinema in its bear essence. Bear essences tend to scare coward people away.

Well done pimp. I was at Annecy this year, on the jury, and enjoying all the great things about the festival. But the attitudes embodied in that opening night film did get right up my nose...it's actually a funny and well-made film, but to show it at Annecy seemed like a licencing of all the most philistine attitudes of that famously intolerant audience. And it confirmed what I keep noticing about the animation world...each section of this broad and infinitely varied spectrum thinks that it can lay down the rules for the whole universe. (Actually, I think art animators are as guilty of this as the Disney-philes, just a bit less powerful.) If this happened with literature, it would be like the cookery book writers telling the philosophers that they should always put a list of ingredients at the top...Animation isn't that different from the written word - you can use it to say anything. Can't we just embrace its diversity?