Matt Bissett-Johnson is back with this surrealistic pandaisia, a vector-animated impressionistic explosiveness, filled with life and action, where our reasoning faculty crumbles under the weight of a psychedelic, transcendental exploration of the cycle of life.

To try to find meaning in this piece of work following rationalistic methods will negate the overall purpose of the creator’s sense-perception based extravaganza. Matt, as always, does not hesitate to victimize the viewer on the altar of noematic obscurity, by clouding his/hers cognitive mechanisms.

“The Cycle of Life” is a comical hymn to absurdism; a hymn to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and its failure to achieve this purpose, either due to its inability or simply because such meaning does not exist.

Matt, as always, employs a number of his favorite ambiguous creatures, (that might as well have been talking cucumbers but this is his powerful trademark after all), to assemble his army in order to attack the generally accepted, mighty understanding of reality.

The creator’s archetypal characters try to create their own meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe, to engage with a detached world, in which they are thrown into, “burdened with the task of creating themselves through their choices and actions”. The cutest thing being, that, amongst all this existential turbulence, they don’t seem to care less. 

What makes the work’s undisputable authenticity even more remarkable is Matt’s minimal, distorted original score.

As with Matt’s two previous projects submitted for evaluation, existential dread is the driving force of his dramas. And with this one as well, he is consciously experimenting by deploying superficiality and perfunctorily in order to elaborate his ideas, presenting an interesting but structurally weak, cult, animated short film, destined for the few rather than many. Is that wrong?