Every time a song, a movie, an illustration or a piece of writing causes a scandal for any reason, I’m always impressed by how the root of it all is merely a person who had an idea. You can go to your room right now, sit in your underwear and write that horror story that disgusts people or paint that picture that enrages people. Your quiet thoughts, more modest and invisible than dust mites at first, can spread and become treated like strong, living things. And maybe they are.
In the seminal wordless French animated short L’Idee, an idea is a naked person, dreamed up in someone’s mind and then sent out into the world. We can’t tell if it’s a good idea or a bad 
idea. Doesn’t matter. All we know is that people are now reacting to it, shocked by it, attempting to change it, using it, stealing it, capitalizing on it, gathering for it, living for it, killing for it and dying for it. Meanwhile, the idea still stands about nude and ghost-like. No one can kill it.
It’s not a ground-breaking metaphor, even in 1932 (this is an adaptation of a 1920 book by Flemish artist Frans Masereel, whose works composed entirely of woodcut illustrations are among the first graphic novels). Its thematic arithmetic is elementary and its storytelling machinery is simple. The art is in the telling, which is done here through ethereal multi-plane animation from a director, Berthold Bartosch, who seems to be experimenting along the way, to great effect. You can see the clipped edges of the paper and the tentative human movements of the pieces onscreen. Over eighty years later, you can still smell the glue and the ink. You check your own fingers for stains afterward.
It makes you feel closer to the film, like it was a dream that you had.