Exeter Phoenix is screening Nature’s Resources, a programme of six short animated films about the relationship between humans and non-humans, as part of the Fashion in Film Festival on Saturday 18 October.
Introduced by curator Susie Evans, it includes children’s animations from around the world made over the past 100 years.
Comicalamities (1928) sees Felix the Cat encounter underwater creatures of the sea, while Russian animation Butterfly (1972) explores a young boy’s relationship with creatures of the air.
In How the Little Mole Got His Trousers (1957), the first of a 45 year-long series by Czech animator Zdeněk Miler, the titular mole enlists the help of various animals to weave and sew his garment.
Däumlienchen (1954), a telling of Han Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina rendered by German silhouette artist Lotte Reiniger, features a tiny girl and her adventures with animals including a mole, a mouse and a maybug.
Idodo (2021), a joint American-Swiss production, tells the story of how reef fish acquired their beautiful colours based on an ancestral legend from Papua New Guinea and A is for Ant (2024) by photographer Jack Davison features animal representations of each letter of the alphabet.
Still from How the Little Mole Got His Trousers (1957).
Fashion in Film Festival is a non-profit arts organisation based at Central Saint Martins which explores the relationship between fashion, cinema and the moving image.
Nature’s Resources is being screened as part of GROUNDED, the festival’s eighth edition, at sixteen venues in London, Dundee, Glasgow, Inverness, Bristol and Exeter.
Exeter Phoenix is also hosting short film programme Animal Matters and a screening of documentary Dust to Dust, both focussed on fashion production and its impact on the natural world, as part of the two-day event.
Nature’s Resources begins at 11am on Saturday 18 October 2025 at Exeter Phoenix.
Tickets cost £9 or £5 for students.
For more information and to book visit the Exeter Phoenix website.
