In terms of the painstaking work that goes into any Lawrence Jordan animation, this first feature-length work is an epic, the fruits of some seven years' labor. Eloquent, mysterious, Sophie's Place is also "unplanned," in the sense that its scenes and sequences are the result of spontaneous poetic symbolic associations edited in-camera. Jordan has called the film an "alchemical autobiography," centering around a variety of forms of Sophia, the Greek and Gnostic embodiment of spiritual wisdom, and the mosque of Saint Sophia in Constantinople. Fred Camper writes in The Chicago Reader, "(Jordan's) great theme is the celebration of the power of the human imagination; his films are full of enchanted spaces, film worlds set apart from the banality of daily living--privileged arenas in which the imagination can run free...(In Sophie's Place) static engravings of Saint Sophia, of castles, of trees and flowers, serve as settings for a spectacular variety of foreground objects that dance across the frame. Objects and figures change shape, transforming themselves via rapid montage. A huge eye and eyebrow rotate on a larger bald head. Photographs of human and animal figures cavort about with a jagged rhythm. It is a commonplace of film history that, almost from its invention, cinema has tended to portray either magic or reality...Jordan has acknowledged both trends in Sophie's Place. His jaggedly moving figures are hand-colored animations based on Muybridge's photographs. But his film's magic is not merely historical reference...(It) evokes a past so idealized and so utterly other than the life we know that it suggests a simultaneous nostalgia for the past and awareness that the past cannot be recaptured."