"Sabin Bălașa was a contemporary Romanian painter, writer and director of animation films. His works are described by himself as belonging to Cosmic Romanticism.
"Among Bălaşa’s most notable works are several large-scale fresco paintings, such as those decorating the inside of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania. These 19 murals depict the history and mythology of the Romanian people, expressed through archetypal figures immersed in a romantic and cosmic atmosphere." - The Door of Perception
The paintings are kitsch (he did a bunch of heroic paintings of Ceaușescu and wife) but the animations, simply through the addition of stilted "life", become eerie
I can imagine Bălașa making a decent fist of an animated feature based on David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus.
The latter, published in 1920, is not exactly science fiction, nor fantasy, but a tortured religious vision. Absurd yet with a unsettling quality of reality and gravity that takes it out of that zone of the Marvelous a.k.a. make-it-up-as-you-go-along cobblers. It starts with a seance or spiritualist type meeting in an Edwardian living room, there are three gentlemen... but then quickly.... well, it's hard to say what proceeds from that, paraphrase wouldn't quite convey.... logic and plausibility quickly disappear without any loss of a sense of reality or grim seriousness... Rather than s.f. or space fantasy, it's really a slightly barmy religious vision you can't shake off. The outer space location - Tormance, a planet around Arcturus - is almost incidental..
Harold Bloom was such a fan of Arcturus (he claimed to have read it hundreds of times!) that he tried to write a sort of an extension of it, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (1979).His only attempt at a novel.
Here's artwork for a Ukrainian band called Vakula who've made a whole album based on Voyage to Arcturus
More Bălașa
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