Dustin Yellin Brings His "Frozen Cinema" to life With Goodnight, Lamby

Dustin Yellin’s practice is described as “frozen cinema,” and a new animated short brings one of his glass collages to life for the first time. The film is inspired by his four-year-old daughter, Zia, who stars alongside Paul Rudd and Chris Rock. Zia begins a Looking-Glass adventure through Yellin’s work, The Politics of Eternity, after losing her favorite cuddly toy, Lamby. The project is produced by Goodnight and LambyDarren Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup. Influences include stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer, and animator Ricardo Villavicencio uses AI tools from Google DeepMind to create a tactile feel aligned with Yellin’s art. Yellin shapes the film using Zia’s real reactions to his artworks, emphasizing children’s animistic, assemblage-based logic and the physical evidence of making.

"To a four-year-old, the world is inherently animistic. Zia zeroes in on the tiny, absurd physical anomalies in my art - a cutout of a vintage car floating next to a botanical illustration. She loves the physical evidence of the making: things like trapped air bubbles. Children operate via assemblage and collage; their logic is rhizomatic, not linear. They understand intuitively that you can tape a feather to a brick and call it a bird."

"Yellin worked on the project with animator Ricardo Villavicencio, who drew on AI tools from Google DeepMind to create a tactile feel sympathetic to Yellin's own art. Influenced by the work of stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer, the short sees Zia embark on a Looking-Glass adventure through one of her father's works, The Politics of Eternity, after she loses her favourite cuddly toy, Lamby."

"Yellin's hallucinatory collaged sculptures are a whole universe unto themselves - he cites the likes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel for the macroscopic and microscopic simultaneity of their painting - and Zia's journey in the film is likewise steeped in a sense of the sublime. That said, Yellin's goal for the project was to create something his daughter could enjoy."

"It's a visual lexicon safe enough for her to inhabit joyfully, but dense and surreal enough to induce existential vertigo in an adult, says the artist, who adds that Ru"

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