Valeriy Kozhin transforms Lewis Carroll's poem "The Mad Gardener's Song" into a surrealist adventure that maintains the spirit of the poet's work and incorporates a wildness that is all Kozhin's.

The film conveys an abstracted conceit of a logic game. Using paper cut-outs and puppets, porcelain dolls, and minuscule objects, Kozhin draws on images of childhood.

Using a color palate rich in natural pigments, his work also feels like more classic animation--a mixture of Marc Davis era Disney and Jan Svankmajer, one of Valeriy's favorite filmmakers.
"I see a new world with my eyes when I am inside a film," Kozhin said. "I think that cinema is a young art. We have the great opportunity to make more than we can imagine in animation."

That imagination, which seems to be equally enamored with the romantic and grotesque, has created an alluring lullaby for those boys and girls who still read under the covers after the lights have been turned off.