A lovely and spare animated film illustrating the poem, “The Term,” by William Carlos Williams. The film is an homage to the work of Williams and to the school of Imagist Poetry, which he founded and best exemplifies. The filmmaker chose this particular poem because of the power of the imagery, the constant metamorphosis, the musicality of the words and the gentle humanistic quality of the message. All these things lend themselves well to film: particularly to the style of animation she has developed. The animation is hand-drawn pencil on paper, fully animated twelve drawings per second. The drawings illustrate the poem as it is being read in voice-over. The poem describes an image of a “rumpled sheet of brown paper” which, as it rolls along the street, resembles the form of a man. It is run over and crushed by a car but, unlike a man, rises again, rolling with the wind, assuming its original shape.
