Educational Media Reviews Online

This elegantly crafted and inspiring profile is affectionately devoted to magician, inventor, poet and polymath Jerry Andrus, best known as one of the world's greatest 3-D illusionists. Andrus, who died three years later in 2007 at the age of 89, was a polymath and autodidact whose restlessly inquisitive and spritely mind finds generous expression throughout the film.

The film follows Andrus through his “Castle of Chaos” home in Albany, Oregon, where he shares his inventions, muses philosophically about the nature of human fulfillment, and articulates a kind of ethics at work in his magic-making. “I can fool you,” he says, “because you’re human. You have a wonderful human mind that works no different from my human mind. Usually when we're fooled, the mind hasn't made a mistake. It's come to the wrong conclusion for the right reason." According to Andrus, there is something edifying involved in the process of our experiencing these wrong optical conclusions and then having the reasons for them exposed to us: an awed enlargement of our sense of how variously the world can be seen, and renewed wonder at the instrument – the human mind – through which it is seen. Among the many pleasures in watching the documentary is participation in this process through a host of optical illusions demonstrated by Andrus (such the ‘Tri-Zonal Space Warper’, perhaps Andrus’ most famous invention).

Extra features include several outtakes, Andrus’ last interview, vintage performances of magic tricks, and a ‘Tri-Zonal Space Warper’ loop