In the imaginary world of The Missing Key, people have gramophones instead of heads. Young composer Hero Wasabi leaves Japan with his oboist cat Jacuzzi and travels to Venice. There he studies with Madame Zero, the terrifying director of the Scuola di Musica. One of his class mates, Count Telefino, is a crooked aristocrat with a phone for a head.  He will come up with all sorts of ruses to win the school’s graduation prize: The Abacus Scroll. Telefino’s dark plan includes stealing his rival’s music and destroying their instruments…

Johnatan Nix is the director of this 30 minute long film. Nix studied at the Australian University School of Art in Sidney and at the Animation and Interactive Media school at RMIT. He has been bassist, guitarist and singer of several groups, including The Gadflys. He directed his first short-film Hello, in 2003.

The Missing Key won the Best Animation Film and Best Soundtrack awards at ST Kilda Festival, and participated in the Animefest in Athens.

The Missing Key is one of the films selected for the Official Section of the 5th Edition of Valencia’s International Half-length Film Festival ‘La Cabina’.

The missing key (Jonathan Nix, 2011) from Festival La Cabina on Vimeo.