The laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in the nineteenth century led to unexpected discoveries about life in the depths of the ocean, and gave German biologist and painter Ernst Haeckel his life work. Haeckel's passion for science and art were united in his studies of the single-cell sea creatures called radiolarian. Thousands of his lithographs, many drawn from his book Art Forms in Nature, are animated in David Lebrun's film, over two decades in the making and a surprise hit at the Sundance Film Festival. Animation, Lebrun says, pushes Proteus “into something that is beyond documentary into a sensory experience-hopefully an ecstatic, visionary one.” Haeckel, who helped popularize Darwin's theories of evolution, was caught between different ways of viewing the world-rational and religious, passionate and analytical. The cultural and scientific shifts in world view occurring during his lifetime are highlighted through references to Freud and Lenin, readings from Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” as well as through the nineteenth-century images that largely make up the film's visuals.