Imagination is a collaborative experimental film effort by brothers Eric and Jeffrey Leiser, which combines hand-drawn animation, stop-motion puppet animation, pixilation, and time-lapse techniques (by director/animator Eric) with a haunting musical score (by composer Jeffrey). They co-wrote the story about a neuro-psychologist's attempts to understand two twin girls: Anna, who is diagnosed with a rare form of autism called Asperger's, and Sarah, who is diagnosed as legally blind. The girls connect with each other through the realm of their imaginations, expressed through surreal animated imagery. Most of the film consists of using these abstract dreamscapes to show a window into how the girls experience their world, and other dialogue scenes of the psychologist with the girls' parents tie the story together.The idea behind this film resonated with me personally, given that I am not only a stop-motion animator, but also have a younger brother with autism. Many autistic children, such as those my mother works with as a special education teacher, are non-verbal, but my brother Jonathan is of a higher functioning kind, very similar to Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. I often wish I could enter my brother's brain and see how differently he sees the world around him, so I appreciate how Imagination uses animation to suggest this very idea. Leiser's animation, inspired by the work of Czech stop-motion legend Jan Svankmeyer, also resonates with spiritual symbolism, including the recurring appearance of a white fawn or stag. The white stag is a traditional symbol of Christ which hearkens back to the medieval myth of St. Eustace, and has been alluded to in contemporary myths like Narnia and the Harry Potter series. In my own experience with autism, I believe that there is a direct connection these children have which possibly brings them into a very close intimacy with the spiritual realm. It's possible, in my view, that people with autism and Asperger's have keys to certain doors in the human brain that for the rest of us are simply locked. (My brother, on occasion, used to wander around the house repeating to himself that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God." To him, though he may not understand the theological implications behind this, it's simply a fact that he understands in his own way…I often wonder if he understands it better than the rest of us.)

You've got to hand it to Eric Leiser. It takes creative cajones the size of the Mayo Clinic to take on a subject as tricky as mental illness - or in this case, neurological dysfunction - and keep it from being a preachy, predicable disease of the week kind of weeper. The sparkling independent effort Imagination is anything but a limp Lifetime movie, avoiding all the clichés within this type of narrative while investing the film with a far amount of invention and insight. We've all heard tales of twins and their inexplicable psychic connection, how one sibling senses what the other is feeling and visa versa. Well, Imagination is one of the few films that wants to explore the inner workings of that connection. Using stop motion animation, various post-production techniques, and other storyline supposition, Leiser unlocks the inferred secrets of such biological sameness, and then inserts a somber meditation on fate, religion, love, loss, and family into the mix. This is not a straightforward look at said subjects. Instead, Leiser goes the tone poem route, revising his plot with pictures and proposals. He never fully gives away his motives, and this then becomes one of Imagination's undeniable strengths.

Now add Eric (who directed) and Jeffrey (who co-wrote) Leiser to the above list for their absorbing, fascinating Imagination, which contains stunning animated sequences that are often overwhelmingly lurid and oneiric. That's a good thing—for the film's several missteps in, yes, its narrative, its visuals successfully feed that need in me for surreal, abstract dreamscape. It's a rare accomplishment that so fearlessly abandons conventional cinema for astral overload that it often plays more like a music video or one of those Terry Gilliam animated vignettes than a film. But a film it is, ultimately—one that achieves aesthetic beauty and wonderment, even if it ultimately fails to connect emotionally.What Imagination gets right is its namesake—the animated sequences in which the twins escape into their fantasies and attempt to make sense of the complicated world going on around them. Think Pan's Labyrinth or Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, only far more abstract. These animated sequences are achieved with primitive-looking puppetry and stop motion animation, with abstract water color paintings serving as backgrounds, but these sequences' simplistic nature is part of its considerable style and charm: They represent the half-realized, continuously developing world of two children who are desperately trying to make sense of their lives. Each dream therefore seems to reveal just a few more rooms of their made-up world. By the end of the film, the sisters have developed a fantasy location in which every inch of the screen provides important details; the effect brings to mind the "living" castle in Jean Concteau's Beauty and the Beast, in which every wall, window frame, and candlestick seems to share a secret that the protagonists do not know about.In these dreams, the twins fuse into a single body (though we hear both their voices speaking at the same time), and the film utilizes biblical and literary imagery that the children use as signposts to interpret the emotional absences of their parents and their increasingly overbearing disabilities. The single animated representation of the twins looks like a hastily-formed, unfinished angel, and this is precisely the embodiment of their reality, at least according to their parents' frequent disappointment with their handicaps. The world they inhabit is sharper, more graceful, and it contains some of the most visionary animation that I've seen—particularly in the details, which includes trees with eyes on its bark and a recurring fawn that turns from an creature of light to a messenger of death in a gradual transition that becomes remarkably terrifying. I'm not going to give away any more of this fully-realized animated world, except to say that they clearly spring from superior creative spirit and that they consistently top themselves in terms of mesmerizing feasts for the eyes. If some of the live action scenes are questionable, Imagination absolutely sparks to life and achieves moments of pure visionary greatness as soon as the children retreat into their dreams.I am in awe of every animated frame that the Leiser brothers create. Eric's live action work, filmed on 16mm, is a bit more inconsistent. Some sequences are derivative and go on for too long, such as the extended earthquake sequence that begins strong with shots of crumbling rocks but eventually becomes overkill when the camera repeatedly shakes over images of cities, cars, roads, etc. There's another scene like this when the psychologist tosses and turns repeatedly; that he cannot sleep is a point made quickly—why do they linger for so long on his restlessness? On the other hand, some scenes demonstrate great power, such as the director's choice to provide close-ups of the twins' eyes and mouths as they overhear a heated argument between their parents. The effect is so intimate that it grows efficiently unnerving. Eric is also very good at framing—note the way that the doctor's hands overpower the rest of his body as he sits comfortably at his desk, explaining new strategies for approaching the twins' disabilities. He is a man driven completely by his toils.Imagination has been a three years project for the Lesier brothers, and it was time well spent. There is something utterly hopeful in the thought that a blind girl's fantasy can take her to the Tree of Life, so that she can stand before it and observe both its splendor and its shortcomings, weigh the odds, and eventually decide to taste the fruit. Imperfections result, but the experiences gained are too important to miss—which is exactly how I feel about this movie. The Tree of Life, in the end, exists primarily in the sacred hallows of our minds, which is where the Lesiers keep it and nurture it—unblemished, beautiful, threatening, and quietly informing our dreams. Keep an eye on these fellows; they possess the boldness and, certainly, the imagination of the masters.

This film is about the unbounded dreams and imagination of two twin sisters, one is blind while the other has Asperger's Syndrome.I was hoping for a touching drama about people with disabilities, how parents deal with it, how the children express themselves, being happy despite the circumstances etc. It turns out that none of my expectations were met. Instead, "Imagination" turns out to be an imaginative and artistic piece that belongs more to a modern art museum than the big screen. It looks more like a collage of artistic slips stitched together. There is really no plot, as the so called plot only serves as the backdrop of the artistic clips.If you like modern art, then you will appreciate this film. If not, you will find it a big mess and a waste of time.