Animation is something that I’ve followed since I was a film student in North Carolina a few years back. Occasionally, the projectionist would play a short film before each movie started. Sometime in my first trimester there, we were sitting down waiting for The Grifters to start. The lights went down and the trustworthy title screen appeared for The National Film Board of Canada. What followed was a ten-minute film by the animator, Ryan Larkin, “Street Musique.”

“Street Musique” stood alone from any other animation I had seen. I grew up on Tex Avery, Looney Toons, and Cartoon Network. Though, this was the first time I had ever seen or viewed animation as expressive and visual, an evocation of mood rather than a combination of story and slapstick humor. It’s easy to view it as a form of antiquated psychedelia (and in all honesty, some of it is). However, its simplicity is rewarding, like sitting down and opening an anthology of poetry, randomly selecting a page and being floored by the poem. After “Street Musique” ended, I thought, I wish I could see like that.

I forgot about this animation until later in the year when my school showed “Ryan” a short animated documentary about Ryan Larkin. At first many of the visuals seemed familiar, the ones projecting inside of his head. I looked him up and was rekindled with the same energy I felt when I saw “Street Musique” for the first time. “Walking” is another excellent example of his mastery, nominated for an Academy Award in 1970, merely portraits of how different people walk.

Larkin’s story is a sad story, but I’ll spare it for now. What stands is his small body of work, unparalleled to any other animations I’ve encountered. His visuals and his colors evoke something far greater than I believe he intended, as if he let his mind loose on the paper and didn’t clean it up or figure it out until after it was completed. His work is the mind’s eye, not necessarily reliant or dependent on the mode of communication, its conformities or standards. “Street Musique” is hypnagogic and dreamlike, almost like a child seeing things for the first time. In ways like this, it is seemingly more poetic than poetry.