Moon Breath Beat is a 1980 animated experimental student film by Lisze Bechtold about her cats turning into abstract figures.
The film was made while Bechtold was a student at California Institute of the Arts. Her instructor, Jules Engel, asked the class to make a film answering the question, "What happens when an animator follows a line, a patch of color, or a shape into the unconscious? What wild images would emerge?"[1]
Lisze Bechtold later went on to do visual effects on FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) and The Prince and the Pauper (1990).[2][3] She collaborated on My Film, My Film, My Film (1983), which is in the collection of MoMA, New York.[4] She also writes children's books including the Buster the Very Shy Dog series[5][6][7] and Toots the Cat.[8]
Moon Breath Beat was selected to the United States National Film Registry in 2014 as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[3][9] The film was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.[10]
It has been described as "full of color, creepiness and unforgettable imagery".[11]