This short animation film, which has screened in Australia with Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, shares that movie's evocation of nature's mysteries and menacing beauty. In Viviane Elnécavé's film, (made with an etching technique), a little girl wakes up into a dream of a nocturnal forest. She sleepwalks through it, encountering the creatures that come alive at night. Then the forest goes berserk. Trees groan and grasp at her. Spirits whirl and spin as she runs for safety. The bats attack and leave her hanging upside-down, suspended from a tree branch, eyes wide in terror. It takes an incandescent lunar rabbit to rescue the little girl from the nightmare, which dissolves into a circus trapeze act presided over by another rabbit - a chuckling magician in a top hat, frock coat, and checkered pants.
Like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, Luna takes you into the world of the unconscious, a child's world of seductive mystery and barely escapable peril. The film anticipates Tim Burton's evocative atmospheres.