The Chicago International Film Festival “Animation Nations” short film slate:
“Film Noir” (Osbert Parker, United Kingdom)
An experimental genre piece, which is either just as exciting or just as annoying as that sounds. The film uses stop frame animation of chiaroscuro-lit models with photographic cutouts of people to show several film noir moments without any regard to a narrative throughline; it’s just dark and gritty for the sake of it. Which is fine by me, and coupled with the incredible style (which at times recalls Jan Svankmajer), it’s a remarkable visual experience. 9/10
“Aldrig som första gangen!” (Jonas Odell, Sweden)
Four interviews with real people are used as the soundtrack for individual segments describing the speaker’s first sexual experience. Each of the segments is animated in a wholly different style, reflecting the time and feelings of the speaker’s experience, and all of them are well-made and interesting to look at; the standout is clearly the third segment, where a young woman speaks in measured tones about the time she was raped. It’s a shocking and moving sequence, but it tends to imbalance the film and draw attention away from the other segments. 9/10
“The Luminary” (Nicholas Kallincos, Australia)
A cute stop-frame piece concerning a bug collector with a lightbulb for a head, and his doomed relationship with a lady moth. The visuals are clever but not particularly compelling, and the story manages the neat trick of being padded at 10 minutes long. 6/10
“Banquise” (Claude Barras & Cédric Louis, Switzerland)
An overweight child of indeterminate gender dresses in heavy coats in the middle of summer because of his/her fear of being made fun of by the rail-thin children all around. Meanwhile, s/he dreams of life among the penguins in the Antarctic. And then dies of heatstroke. It looks wonderful, 2-D animation in pastels that manages to achieve a strange sense of texture (especially when the child sweats), but the goofy and cartoonish visuals clash shockingly with the end, and not in a good way. 6/10
“Guide Dog” (Bill Plympton, USA)
Not Plympton’s best by a long measure, it’s the sequel to his Oscar-nominated “Guard Dog,” which I have not seen. A mutt of some sort endeavors to find employment leading the blind, but circumstances outside his control lead in every case to their demise. The dog is animated with wit and personality, and the gags work without exception; I just wish that the character design was even slightly innovative. 7/10
“La sacoche perdue” (Cathérine Buffat & Jean-Luc Gréco, France)
Puppet animation depicting a traditional medieval story about a man who loses all his money at church, and the separate man who tries to return it. The story makes no more sense than any other medieval fable, but the look is remarkable, from the grossly distorted faces of the puppets to the Gilliam/Seuss influence of the sets, to the effects animation, recalling nothing so much as the early music videos of Michel Gondry. 7/10
“The Danish Poet” (Torill Kove, Canda/Denmark)
An utterly typical piece, shot in primary-color cel animation. It certainly doesn’t help that it’s the longest short in the program. Liv Ullmann narrates the story of how coincidence and luck lead to true love, and it’s sad but true that most of the interest the film generates is in the meta-commentary that her presence provides to an inert story about pan-Scandinavian romance. 4/10
“McLaren’s Negatives (Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre, Canada)
A documentary on Canada’s greatest animator, Norman McLaren, and it seems right that a celebration of that man should itself be animated. Sadly, it’s too short to go into any detail on McLaren’s life, and the best parts of the film are not Saint-Pierre’s interstitials showing McLaren’s process, but rather the clips shown from his films ranging from “Begone Dull Care” to “Neighbors” to “Pas de deux.” It raises the question of why one wouldn’t rather just watch those. 6/10
“One Rat Short” (Alex Weil, USA)
The only CGI short, it’s a bittersweet story of a street rat finding love with a lab rat whom he meets after after chasing a bag of chips into an air vent. The animation approaches photorealism, but that makes the anthropomorphic emotions expressed on the faces of highly realistic-looking rats extremely grotesque. And it doesn’t have quite enough story to justify its running time, either. 7/10