A weaker year than last year’s slate overall, but most of the eleven animated shorts presented this year were pretty good (the best one in the bunch is an experimental throwaway, if that tells you anything). A bit heavy on frivolous comedy, and low on really inventive technique, but at least the comedies were generally very funny.
“Hot Dog” (Bill Plympton, USA)
The third of Plympton’s films, after Oscar nominee “Guard Dog” and “Guide Dog” to star a drooling, hideous bulldog that the animator calls his Mickey Mouse, although given the films’ tone and style, it might be better to call the dog Plympton’s Goofy – a hapless naïf whose desire to do good only ever causes trouble. Though neither Goofy nor Mickey left quite so many bodies in their wake.
Anyway, Plympton’s style in these films – colored pencil on paper at 6 frames per second – is very much a love-it-or-hate-it affair, and if you’ve seen any of the “Dog” films, you’ve pretty seen all of them, both in terms of the gags and the narrative: in this one, the dog wants to join a fire department, but when his efforts to put out a fire that nobody else notices ends in disaster, he’s left out in the cold, as always. As one who generally enjoys Plympton’s work, I’d say this is roughly in the middle of the series, quality-wise: not quite as funny as “Guard Dog”, but at least a bit more inventive than “Guide Dog”. It’s also the dirtiest of the three. 8/10
“The Black Cabinet” (Christine Rebet, USA)
I’m really a bit lost what to make of this film: apparently a group of people are having a séance, but it’s the work of a machine? Anyway, the film uses split-screen virtually nonstop, which is certainly something different and intersting, but it doesn’t help to make the plot any clearer; and the animation style itself, though reasonably attractive, isn’t very distinctive at all; I might even be tempted to call it the most typical-looking of all the films here. 5/10
“Kizi Mizi” (Mariusz Wilczyński, Poland)
A great 8-minute idea stretched to an intolerable 21 minutes, “Kizi Mizi” is the story of a love affair that goes sour presented as a bedtime story about a cat and mouse with a daily appointment to meet clandestinely and screw around. The medium itself is crude but unusually evective, visually – it appears to be literally nothing but black marker and office paper with tinting effects added – and the extremely low-detail art clashes humorously with Wilczyński’s semi-graphic sexual detail (mostly tongues and swaying mouse boobs). But the story is marred by unconscionable amounts of repetition, both in events and in the animation used to show them, and the film wasn’t even halfway over by the time I was completely bored with it. The gag at the very end is undoubtedly hilarious, but not at all worth the wait – Wilczyński might want to take a look at “Bambi Meets Godzilla” for an example of how to do that sort of thing right. 4/10
“Procrastination” (Johnny Kelly, UK)
Proably the most unique film of all shown here: sort of like a parody of those bits on Sesame Street and other kids’ shows where something is defined by many different examples of what it is. In this case, the idea of procrastination is explained as all the different things you can do with your time that aren’t productive, each of which is helpfully illustrated with some tremendously inventive mixed-media stop-motion animation. In addition to its hilariously dry, British tone, this is easily the most exciting film of the bunch to look at; and that counts for a hell of a lot in animation, as far as I’m concerned. 10/10
“Trepan Hole” (Andy Cahill, USA)
Cahill’s debut, “Spontaneous Generation”, showed here last year, and for my tastes it was a significantly better work. “Trepan Hole” (the title a reference to trepanning, the medical procedure of drilling a hole through the skull) is also a particularly mushy stop-frame animation piece, but in this case Cahill isn’t referencing Jan Švankmajer’s work so much as accidentally parodying it: the fixation on how two worm-shaped objects interact and combine tries to be disturbingly sexual but just comes across as very clay-ey; it was hard not to keep thinking about the animation, rather than the content. You know what I honestly think the difference is? The sound design isn’t as squishy and organic as it was in Cahill’s last film. 6/10
“Stand Up” (Joseph Pierce, UK)
You know those comics whose humor isn’t about being funny so much as it is about being angry and confrontational? Pierce’s film is about one of them, and it’s not very flattering, supposing that bile-spewing John J. Jones (voiced by Daniel Rigby) uses comedy as a thin shell to hide his violent impulses. As he hurls abuse and occassionally wit as his audience, his body splashes around almost without form, distorting weirdly in an apparent reflection of the comic’s disordered mental state. The high-contrast black-and-white is a good match for the story’s ugliness, both internal and visual, and I generally like a good combination of form and content, but “Stand Up” is so obvious and unpleasant that I’m not sure why anyone would ever want to see it a second time. 6/10
“John and Karen” (Matthew Walker, UK)
John, a polar bear, tries to aplogise to Karen, a penguin, for some mean-spirited things he said last night. That’s pretty much the entirety of this unusually short short film, produced as an interstitial for British television. Thankfully, the film knows that it has only one card to play (a polar bear and a penguin as lovers = inherently cute), and doesn’t go overboard trying to do more than establish a scenario that only the bitterest viewer will find unamusing The clean, bright animation style goes well with the one-gag story, and although the film is absolutely disposable, it’s quite pleasing. 7/10
“Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight” (Felix Massie, UK)
I absolutely enjoyed this film more than I had any reason to. Using Flash animation or something like it, we see the seven floors of an office building done as little more than a line drawing, populated by characters who look like multicolored ambulatory versions of the pegs from The Game of Life. One of those pegs is Keith Reynolds, whose dreams for the day are crushed and then crushed even more, in an unexpectedly sardonic riff on the increasingly sardonic “office life sucks” genre. Simple as hell, but its tremendously memorable, both in the script and visuals. 9/10
“Lavatory – Lovestory” (Konstantin Bronzit, Russia)
A charming simple narrative about the lady attendant of a public men’s restroom (her job consists of making sure people pay on their way in, and cleaning up when things get too filthy. While this incredibly tedious life grinds along, she dreams of finding romance; but it finds her instead, in the form of mysterious flowers that keep appearing, without any indication of which of the many men who walk past is leaving them there. Not a very ambitious story, but it’s absolutely appealing, and the simple cartoon style (it looks a lot like a movie James Thurber drawing) is easy on the eyes. 7/10
“Fuera de Control” (Sofia Carillo, Mexico)
A crazy nightmare of stop-motion dolls that look like half-finished corpses, Carillo’s film is more than a bit redolent of Tim Burton’s gothic animations, but infinitely more disturbing. The narrative, in which the residents of a dark house come to be aware of each other as more than just random presences, is significantly less interesting than the imagery, which is frankly the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in a movie theater for at least a couple of years – particularly the eyeless doll’s head that starts weeping rivers. Though there’s a happy ending, this stil stands as one of the year’s best cinematic nightmares, even at a mere 11 minutes long. 9/10
“Lögner” (Jonas Odell, Sweden)
Very much like the director’s last film, “Never Like the First Time!”, this one uses interviews with real people as the launching point for three very different segments about the lies people tell: in the first, pop-art and rotoscope liven the story of a burglar who tries to convince the cops he’s an accountant; the second is a mixed-media collage of cardboard, hand-drawn figures and CGI in which a man recalls the time he took the fall in school for a crime he didn’t commit; the third, a computer-animated piece meant to look like construction paper cutouts, is about a woman whose entire life has been about lying to everyone she knows. Not quite as fresh or inventive as Odell’s previous work, but the third segment in particular looks outstanding. 8/10