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| Butter Ya Self. |
Dance of Death (Choi Ye Won, Lee Young Guen & Park So Young, South Korea) offers a trippy vision of life flashing before one's eyes as an elderly man falls to his doom. A dance doesn’t really work without a song, though, and SC5 riotously carries a tune with Butter Ya’ Self (Julian Petschek, USA). Butter Ya’ Self brings da beats to SC5 as a banana raps an ode to his bling while a bun—sorry, a muthafuckin’ BUN—gives everyone a piece of herself in this silly number about the thug life of the grocery store. This jammin’ ’toon is tons of fun as director Julian Petschek provides all four food groups and a healthy dose of butter in this stop-motion riot. OIAF better make sure that the ByTowne, home to many of the festival screenings this year, adopts the song as an anthem to the oh-so-buttery popcorn that provides hearty meals throughout the year!
SC5 tickles the funny bone with a few shorts that are
amiable, but are more margarine than butter, as the programme continues with 365
(The Brothers McLeod, UK). 365
features an exciting premise—the brothers animate one second of film each and
every day of the year—but the joke grows tired around June and the film keeps
on truckin’ to giggles from the audience that grow quieter throughout the year.
More sillytime comes in David O’Reilly’s Korean propaganda crisis Heaven’s
Countryland ‘Part 4: Children’,
which isn’t as funny as the other episodes of O’Reilly’s series to play at the
festival. Finally, the short but sweet A Tale of Momentum and Inertia
(Kameron Gates & Kirk Kelley, USA) offers a droll tale of Sisyphusian chaos
as the man with the boulder lets gravity do its work to bold effect. This funny
film gives SC5 a healthy punchline with which to end the programme.
The dramatic side of Shorts Competition 5 features an
inspiring pair of minimalist efforts with The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
(Ross Hogg, UK) and Crazy Little Thing (Onohana, Japan). These shorts both offer
black-and-white tragedies about familial relationships gone awry. Hat takes a more abstract approach by
using the spatial properties of the frame to create disorienting moods and
conflicting viewpoints. The smudgy charcoal one the left draw out the details
of the right, and everything blurs with fury in this shrewd visualization of
the work by Oliver Sacks. Crazy, on
the other hand, uses the suffocating restrictions of created space to find a
form of madness as one girl escapes her alcoholic father, but cannot get away
from the guilt she feels once reality sets in. The sparse pencil markings are
an effective conception of horror.
SC5 offers some body horror, too, with its sharply grotesque
deconstruction of body image in Supervenus (Frederic Doazan,
France). Supervenus composes a
symphony of madness as the body of an average woman goes under a plastic
surgeon’s scalpel. Boobs blossom, lips puff, tummies tuck, and legs lengthen.
Add a shock of tanning light and … voilà! She looks just like Barbie. It’s
freaky, though, to watch this woman become increasingly less human the more the
film doctors her image to fit an idea of perfection. Supervenus satirizes our idea of beauty, perverts it, and unmasks
it as the grotesquerie that it is.
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| The Obvious Child. |
Supervenus offers
one of the memorable entries in short competition 5, but he highlight of the
programme is easily the surreal The Obvious Child (Stephen Irwin,
UK). This messed-up bedtime story is, in a way, a love story as one poor widdle
wabbit plays witness to the mess a young girl must clean up after her parents
are brutally murdered. The rabbit, who narrates the tale in dryly halting
voiceover, falls instantly in love with the demon child as she bargains with
the cloud about to get her parents into heaven. Director Stephen Irwin offers a
macabre, almost carnivalesque vision of love and death as The Obvious Child pops vibrant colours into an absurd scenario.
Irwin frames the animation through the lens of an iris and divides it in
chapters, creating an image of innocence recounted through rose coloured
glasses as the submissive bunny recalls love at first sight. The Obvious Child, disturbed and
debauched, is certifiably bonkers, but it joins a rank of shorts at OIAF this
year that shows the best films of the festival take a subversive approach to
cuddly animals. Animation need not be cute nor pander to children: make it bold
and dark like The Obvious Child does.
The juxtaposition of fluffy playtime with a punch in the face makes for a most
memorable film.
Please visit www.animationfestival.ca
for more information on this year’s festival.
