You would think that life as a stone would be bor­ing, right? Wrong! After I saw Das Wheel (The Rocks) I realised, you could have a blast of a time! Imag­ine using a pine nut as a hand grenade, which you can throw near by your vic­tim. only instead of an explo­sion a tree would spring in a mat­ter of sec­onds, or what seems to sec­onds to you.

This is one of the most clever con­cepts I’ve seen in an ani­ma­tion, the idea of time and how absurd longevity makes Earth feel like a com­pletely dif­fer­ent planet with dif­fer­ent rules of physics. I can see a lot of thought went into this and the plan­ning must have been fun in itself.

This piece was cre­ated by four stu­dents of the Fil­makademie Baden-Wurttemberg in Ger­many crafted this mas­ter­ful work of art. Das Rad was writ­ten and directed by Chris Sten­ner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wit­tlinger. This is a text book award win­ning ani­ma­tion, com­bin­ing the best tricks of stop-motion, pup­petry and com­puter graph­ics. It was won too many awards to list here but if you’re curi­ous please visit the offi­cial web­site.