Film: "Torrey Pines"
Animator and musician Clyde Petersen takes us on a tour of America with his handmade cut-paper animated feature backed by a killer soundtrack. Musician and director Clyde Petersen
Torrey Pines is an award-winning feature film based on a true story by transgender stop-motion animator Clyde Petersen. The film is a queer punk coming-of-age tale, taking place in Southern California in the early 1990s. With a schizophrenic mother fueled by hallucinations of political conspiracy and family dysfunction, 12-year-old Petersen is taken on a cross-country adventure that will forever alter the family as they know it.
With a killer soundtrack and inventive dialogue, Petersen trusts design, music and character to deliver all the feels. Executed with a healthy heap of wit and psychedelia (Petersen’s vivid childhood imagination and his mother’s schizophrenic visions manifest side by side throughout), Torrey is trippy, hilarious and strangely meditative. Gorgeous, slow pans across colorful paper-cut American landscapes give viewers time to soak in every tree, mountain, telephone pole, Christian crackpot billboard, highway strip club and hilarious bleating roadside animals. As their adventure unfolds, a hypnotic soundtrack by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla completes the sensory experience.
Join Petersen as he takes us back to a time when MTV shaped teenage minds and a generation of nerds were strengthening their thumbs on a Nintendo controller. Put on your swim trunks, grab your boogie board and come enjoy the view at Torrey Pines.
