'The Astronaut’s Journal' is an experimental animation-poem that blends inside its core a strong root of Antoine de Saint Exupery’s 'Little Prince', combined with the visual imagery of a shady beat poem that expresses itself in the depths of the mind of the viewer. Marina Belikova made this short movie with the sole purpose of refreshing the general state of monotony we gather in our heads whilst doing our everyday activities, and change it with a powerful beat that has the same effect on the mind, as a double espresso has to the body.

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The motto this movie comes with is an extract from Stanisław Lem’s ‘Solaris’, and brings to our attention a fact we are too busy to acknowledge in today’s world – we are reaching for the stars, trying to gather as much information as we can regarding the outer space, but we are not interested anymore in finding our inner-self. And the short movie goes on this path – whilst exploring new places, the narrator is basically auto-discovering itself. The animation is perfectly describing the plot, giving a new and completing perspective on the whole picture. If you start watching ‘The Astronaut’s Journal’ you will not just ‘watch’ a short movie, but you will feel a whole new sensorial experience that was designed to touch the viewer at all levels.

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The, (let’s call it) ‘shady imagery’ is a perfect metaphor here, where the narrated story wanders around through your mind, while the animation represents the other side of the moon, the one that gives the viewer peace and closure.

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It is fun to see that after more than one hundred years, starting from ‘A Trip to the Moon’ by Georges Méliès, artists are still fascinated by the outer space and the mysteries that are hard to be reached, but easy to be imagined. With ‘The Astronaut’s Journal’, Marina Belikova wrote another page in the space exploration saga, a book that it’s not going to end any time soon in the foreseeable future. 

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Written by Vlad A. G