Falling short - 2022 Animation shorts

Woof. I'm an animation fan. When I posted a tweet last week in the vein of a lot of the chains going around entitled: "10 films to get to know me" (I'll be writing more on that later), two of those ten were animated films. I read and wrote comics for years, so it's kind of a natural segue between the two media. With that in mind, I'm usually most excited to see the animated shorts when they come around every year, but this year was kind of a trial. Three of the five ranged from forgettable to outright awful; one was at least interesting and the fifth (thankfully the last) was fantastic. It basically saved what was otherwise a pretty poor outing for what we usually expect from these mini-festivals.

An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake And I Think I Believe It: This was the one that had an interesting premise and was at least funny in parts. It's the story of an office worker who realizes that he's trapped in an animation studio and that everything around him is less than it seems. It uses one of my favorite animation techniques, which is stop motion. I'm a diehard Ray Harryhausen fan from when I was a kid, so that labor-intensive process and the slightly jerky motion (much better with modern processing than it used to be) will always have an instinctive appeal to me. Director Lachlan Pendragon not only has a cool name but also was a student when he created this film, which makes it that much more impressive. The fact that Neil (voiced by Pendragon) breaks the fourth wall in a fairly oblique fashion by discovering the processes and the different parts that make up himself and the other puppets, rather than communicating directly with the audience, is another excellent approach. The overarching theme of modern office work being detached from the "real world" is present, but not used as a bludgeon. Why is it an ostrich that clues Neil into what's really happening? Perhaps as a metaphor for people not being willing to notice what their world is until told by the bird who willingly blinds itself according to legend? Perhaps just because it's absurd? Doesn't matter. This was a smart little piece that deserves the notice that it has gotten.

The Flying Sailor: This was an abstract reconstruction of the Halifax Explosion in 1917, centered mostly around the story of Billy Wells, who was hurled almost two kilometers by the blast but survived. While it did heed historical details, like the fact that Billy's clothes were torn from his body in the initial shockwave, it veered off from there into a perspective that Billy might have had in terms of his life flashing before his eyes and taking time to look at the stars while he was hurtling through the air. That's fine, but it doesn't leave us with a whole lot to latch onto, story-wise. It is only an eight-minute film, so I don't think it was intended to deliver anything grandiloquent, but it also didn't say enough to leave much of an impression at all. If you didn't already know that it was about Halifax, you'd come away with even less than that, so I'm a little lost as to how it got nominated in the first place.

Ice Merchants: This one delivered a bit more in that its story was completely fantastical, about a man and his son living in a house perched on a mountainside where they make ice every day and skydive to the town in the valley to sell said ice, losing their hats in the process of the dive and buying new ones every time before they return on their motorcycle winched from the ground. One wonders why they wouldn't just ride the winch to the ground so that they could keep their hats, but I suppose that would deny them the thrill of their power dive every time. It also would spoil the rather indifferent ending when the warming (of the climate? of the seasons?) of the mountainside threatens both their home and their livelihood. I suppose that metaphor about climate change is the most likely and that's all well and good in principle, but one could just as easily draw a metaphor about consumerism with the constant waste of their hats and their need to buy more. Is the awesome heat created by the furious looms down in the town, weaving new hats every day, part of what's contributing to the change that threatens to ruin their lives? That's probably spinning those threads (ahem) out a bit far, but it's that kind of speculation that's needed to really make something of this story that left the feeling it was a bit lacking and, three films in, left me feeling rather underwhelmed about the whole evening until we got to the next film...

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse: ... which was irredeemably awful. In all the years that we've been doing this, I don't think I've ever encountered a short film that I really wanted to walk out of, but there's a first time for everything. This film is dreadfully tedious. I'm all about the overall themes of empathy and kindness, but there really has to be something at least mildly dynamic about characters, story... something! Everything in this story was blasé from the opening moments of the insipid soundtrack. The animation technique was at least somewhat interesting, with the shifting pencil marks outlining the watercolors of characters and scenery, but everything else was soporific and I know it was because I caught myself starting to doze a couple times, which is never a problem in what is usually a collection of interesting perspectives (not just the animation, but all of the shorts on offer.) Tricia compared it to Winnie the Pooh, but even the stories about Pooh had a character like Tigger, who would at least provide some contrast to the fretting and timidity of Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore. There was no such contrast here, as all of them were collegial nihilists, bemoaning their state of affairs while reassuring each other of how fond they all were of the others. At 34 minutes, this was already borderline too long for a short. Given the subject matter, it was about 33 minutes too long.

My Year of Dicks: But the evening was thankfully saved by the best film of the night, which was the last one. Pamela Ribon's story of her fifteen-year-old self trying to force her own sexual awakening was hilarious, familiar, and hugely entertaining, both visually and textually, for its entire 24 minutes. It struck a chord with the whole audience (a packed Michigan Theater screening room) because it unabashedly hit at sensations that everyone in that room had had at one time or another, whether in the role of Pamela or one of the boys that she tries to make her co-conspirator in the plot toward teenaged orgasm. The highlight, of course, was the cascade of anguish and emotion surrounding "the talk" with her father. I really appreciated the funhouse mirror approach to her feelings and expressions and everything that you remember in your own inner visualizations while having those excruciating moments with your parents. This was vastly more inclusive and understandable than the dreary Hallmark animal parade. But since it actually talks about real emotions and not fantasy ones, it will almost certainly lose the statuette to the wooden Pooh facsimiles. It's not like you can imagine anyone on stage actually voicing the title on national TV, anyway, even if they did acknowledge these film creators during the live broadcast, which they no longer do.

So, yeah, a somewhat underwhelming end to our three-day excursion. I think Live Action walked away with my personal "best of"s this time, as I'll remember The Red Suitcase and An Irish Goodbye for a long time, I think.