The Chicago International Film Festival “Animation Nations” short film slate was better this year than last: there weren’t any I truly disliked, like before (although there was only one, and it went on to win the Academy Award), and two that positively sent me reeling.
“Art’s Desire” (Sarah Wickliffe, USA)
View here. A clever enough idea if slightly over-done: what if the subjects of paintings were alive and sentient? And Wickliffe’s ideas are certainly playful within that framework. I can’t help but feel, though, that the animation itself is a little bit jerky, speaking not to a stylistic choice but to cheapness or hurry. Then again, Wickliffe was an NYU undergrad when she made this, and that doesn’t necessarily make it okay, but it’s enough to make me feel like a complete and utter dick for saying anything mean. When I was her age, I was making…well, let’s just not go there. 6/10
“Sleeping Betty” (Claude Coutier, Canada)
View trailer. For my money, the best thing in the world of animation for about the last three decades has been the National Film Board of Canada, the government-funded organisation that only doesn’t seem to much else besides finance cartoons. Well, let them, if the cartoons are like this: the story is straight-up post-Shrek boilerplate about fairy tale characters in the modern world, but the sense of humor is agreeably warped – even Pythonesque. To say nothing of it’s raison d’être, the animation itself, which looks – I should maybe say nothing, I have no idea how they made it – but it looks like it was all done with colored pencils. At any rate, this was the most beautiful film of the night, easily. 9/10
“Flutter” (Howie Shia, Canada)
Two NFB films in a row! And while it doesn’t hit the woozy heights that “Sleeping Betty” does, “Flutter” is still a gorgeous piece. It’s very textured, by which I mean that it appears – and again, I don’t know if this is actually the case – that the animators used found material in their animation. It’s in black-and-white, which helps add to that impression, in any case. The story itself is a tiny little thing about children pushing beyond the boundaries adults set, but more than I think any other representational film here, the style washes out the theme. 7/10
“The Battle of Cable Street” (Yoav Segal, United Kingdom)
The concept is both intriguing and frustrating: a live-action boy and his grandfather are wandering around London, when they arrive at Cable Street, and the old man tells the child about the Cable Street Riot. The battle itself is then rendered in beautiful minimalist animation that is meant to be the child’s drawings. I enjoy the framing, I suppose, but as much of the project is filmed as is animated, and that’s not what I signed up for. Besides, the animation is so low on detail that it’s basically impossible to tell what happened at the battle. It’s a very nice commemoration, but ultimately not that exciting a film. 6/10
Rowlandson Rides Again (Tim Fernee, Ireland)
It helps to know that Thomas Rowlandson was an English caricaturist known for his semi-pornographic artwork going in, because the film certainly doesn’t make that clear. As a collection of stills, this looks great – sort of like pencil sketches on brown paper, but the story is confusing and the animation doesn’t help to sort things out, being much too fluid and amorphous to actually settle down and depict things. Which is too bad: the bawdy poem that drives the story is funny, and the plot involves bestiality, and who doesn’t love a good horse-porn cartoon? 5/10
“For the Love of God” (Joe Tucker, United Kingdom)
A remarkably slimy and squirmy bit of stop-motion animation with figures that look like they were carved out of melting wax with paper mouths. The plot involves some seriously twisted sexuality going on in a Christian bookstore in a red-light district where Graham (voiced by Steve Coogan!) lives with his mother and lusts after God. The family jackdaw (voiced by Sir Ian McKellen!!) provides cryptic and gothic advice, and the whole thing is almost as nasty as it is funny. The ending, unfortunately is what they call “too clever by half.” Still, a triumph of design. 9/10
“Spontaneous Creation (Andy Cahill, USA)”
View here. Oddly enough, it’s not the imagery I find myself thinking of in this particular animation, but the sort of gross (in a good way) squishy sound design. Not that the imagery isn’t striking – it’s rudely physical in a manner at least superficially similar to the work of Jan Švankmajer. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, and the musical score was a bit distracting, but I responded to the utter lack of polish. 8/10
“Yours Truly” (Osbert Parker, United Kingdom)
My favorite short film last year, bar none, was Parker’s “Film Noir,” and its sequel manages to improve on it in almost every way, without necessarily trying for anything new. There is a clear plot in this film, involving the particularly ingenious way a woman disposes of her husband, and the animation, which consists, like its predecessor, of stop-motion model cars and rooms, much like a doll house or train set, with paper cut-outs of movie characters – including Bogie, in this case – as I was saying, the animation is much smoother, and there’s a really creepy way that the actors, who are so clearly slips of paper, seem to be three-dimensional. 10/10
“1977” (Peque Varela, United Kingdom)
A basic coming-of-age tale, about a young woman’s quest to identify herself. The opening 90 seconds are much the best part of the film, animated with an elementally simple black-on-white pencil drawing style that looks exactly like a 7-year-old’s scribbling. The film becomes a little too precious for its own good when the animation starts to take the form of some board games, including Life and Guess Who, and while I appreciate the metaphor, I’m not certain that it works as well as it is supposed to. Much better is the end, when the game imagery is ended and there’s something that’s clearly not rotoscoping but similar in effect. 7/10
“Everything Will Be OK” (Don Hertzfeldt, USA)
From any other director, this would qualify as a career-defining epic, but Hertzfeldt has had the misfortune of directing “Rejected,” a short film of such overwhelming ambition and perfection that even a “better” film would still somehow seem to be a disappointment. Anyway, this is the story of Bill, a man who is probably dying, and who is incredibly sad about that fact despite how completely joyless his life is. The animation is typical of the director’s work: crude characters just one step above stick figures, in this case segregated into “cells” within the frame (all done in-camera). It’s terrifying and funny as hell, obviously. 10/10