Dilemma

Many, many years ago, back in the days when a trip to the cinema meant seeing two movies - one short, then the main feature (often with - gasp! - an intermission) - I remember seeing a computer-generated movie short which featured a swinging pendulum and a sequence of giant, robotic space fish, each being consumed by a larger one.

Some brief research on the interwebs confirmed my suspicion that this film was named 'Dilemma', but it wasn't until today that I actually found a viewable form of the movie on the internet... And I have to say... that isn't the movie I remember.

The animation I remember - quite vividly, such was its impact upon my impressionable young mind - was that it was almost entirely black, with sharp, angular, very clearly vector-graphic bits and bobs, and a minimalist soundtrack - little more than the cold, echoing tick-tock as the pendulum swung across the screen between scenes. The only parts I remember, in fact, are the robotic space fish and the pendulum... and neither memory matches the linked animation by Halas & Batchelor, from 1981.

In many ways, if indeed this is the animation I saw as a young child, it seems that my memory of the film has been utterly corrupted by the videogame series Darius, in which all the end-of-level bosses are... giant robotic space fish.

That still doesn't explain my abiding memory of that unrelenting ticking and tocking pendulum, swinging back and forth, filling the screen with each progression. Sure, there's a pendulum in the linked movie... but there's no ticking or tocking, only a jangly, wibbly sound.

Is this the movie I think I remember? Am I imagining the harsher, more angular look? And why don't I remember any of the other sequences?

Oh, and... 500th post! Woot!