When Sebastian Mullaert and Marcus Henriksson founded Minilogue in 2000, it was not only a musical project but also a visual one. From the beginning, the two musicians thought animals to be the front for Minilogue. These animals do not actually exist, they are imaginary animals. As they appear on Minilogue's record sleeves, they merge elements of all different animals together: there is a donkey with a trunk of an elephant or a mouse with the horns of a deer. With "Animals – The Movie", Minilogue's visual world comes fully into existence. The 80-minute-long DVD is created by Hinge Design from New Zeeland and a couple of other visuals artists. Two segments by Kristofer Ström were released as a preview; "Hitchhiker’s Choice" had more than three million views on YouTube.
The film is divided into fifteen chapters. Each chapter has a topic of its own and develops a unique visual style.  All parts are connected by a certain theme: the conjunctive concept of the film is the idea of universal transformation and movement, which is represented in the animals. The artists follow the surrealist credo that everything is linked with everything else in a hidden way. The only way to uncover these links is art. With its irresistible synthetic dynamics, the film reveals these secret connections. The first chapter puts beautiful old drawings of unfamiliar foreign animals in a memory game. The game sets the whole screen in motion, the animals become part of an unstoppable transformation. After this initializing prologue, the film starts with a labyrinth of windows. Yet there is no floor, no walls and no ceiling: it is the space of a surrealist image. We enter an old barn, which opens to a large landscape with artificial trees. No entity is fixed anymore, everything becomes open and moving. It turns dark, and the trees are immersed in a thick layer of fog. In a very tense and exciting moment, a very special animal appears: At first we only see the texture of a Leopard's skin - but it is not the fur of a real animal, but the artificial fur of a toy pet. As we get a glimpse on the whole animal, we realize it’s not a leopard, but a fantasy-animal with the body of a penguin, the nose and ears of a pig and the horns of an rhinoceros and it starts a charming dance to Minilogue's elegant music.
Hinge Design emphasizes the artificial character of most of their creations. Nature has to go through multiple digital filters to appear on their screen. Everything is divided down to its tiniest elements, and multiplied into repetitive series. The next chapter starts with the inside of an old tape recorder with an analogue VU-display. Later, many VU-meters form an abstract ballet. Photography and computer graphics are merged into one: as they reach the surfaces of decaying materials, they create synthetic worlds. Suddenly an old British telephone cell appears in a luscious computer-generated meadow. A very special charming naiveté is the key note of the film. The whole imaginary is formed around a certain idea of cuteness. The leitmotif of the film is the ever transforming animal that appears in almost every chapter of the DVD. In Kristofer Ström's animated clips for "Animals" and "Hitchhiker's Choice", it goes through countless re-modellings. In the first film the real hand of Ström draws animal after animal in high-speed, until the colorful lines start to move and develop new forms by itself. In another chapter, there is nothing but a rough texture on the screen and a couple of dots and lines, which turn into a lake and swarms of dragonflies and bees rise.
Yet there are phases without any figure. A night drive through a big city is dissolved into nothing but the movement of the white lines at the side of the streets. Another chapter shows an artificial city reminding one of the staged spaces of photographer Thomas Demand: the facades of the houses are just blank surfaces – the camera rapidly moves through the empty streets. "Seconds (Colour of Sound)" by Jon Baxter is the most reduced clip on the DVD: it shows the sky filmed out of a car which moves slowly. It is so dark that we only see the outline of the trees we pass. This line is formed into repetitive patterns. "The first day of the rest of my life" by Dylan Pharazyn is closest to the techno imaginary of the Nineties: We start in a neutral landscape, pills in elegant pastel colours ascend to the sky like birds.
The rhythm of the whole movie is defined by its quiet camera motions. With its countless images and movements, the films put us in a detached position. We watch the world around us like scientists. This remoteness enables us to experience its beauty to its full extent. "Animals – The Movie" manages to combine the repetitive collages of club visuals with the subtleties of video art. It is for sure one of the most ambitious visualisations of today's electronic music. It will appear as well on the TV in your living room as in your favourite club.