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A Festivus for the Rest of Us
It’s fall in Chicago, and that means a few things: the leaves are changing hurriedly into brighter, passionate hues, the city has decorated its major street lights with orange duct tape and decaying corn husks, and the Chicago International Film Festival is upon us once again. Heavily lauded in all the major newspapers, as well as the indie and alternative ones, the Festival kicked off on Thursday with Mark Forster’s (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) new movie, Stranger Than Fiction, which was filmed entirely in Chicago. I could in no way afford to attend this premiere, however, and kicked off my affair with the Festival by attending a series of short films titled “Animation Nation,” which featured nine shorts from seven different countries, including the UK, US, Sweden, Australia, Switzerland, Canada and France. In the spirit of the short film, which mires in artistic visions and innovative approaches, some in the span of a commercial break, I too will keep my reviews short, partially for brevity’s sake and partially because there are only so many cell phone-lit, chicken scratched notes one can take in a dark theater.
"Film Noir" (Osbert Parker, UK, 4 min.)
Having already screened at Cannes and Telluride, "Film Noir" is a bit of a festival slut and is an original spin off of the genre using classic black and white images, archive footage, and found objects to tell its “story.” What that story was exactly, I couldn’t determine, but it involved a lot of gun shots and chase scenes with cut-out copies of gangsters and private dicks. There was a certain surrealism to the speed and real-world objects spliced interjectedly into the film. At one point, the characters leave the mise-en-scene of the short and enter into a Technicolor world of maggots, matchbox cars and wigs that hail taxicabs before the opening sequence is again replayed at the film’s end. A mixed-media wonder, this tribute is eclectic and moderately engaging.
“The Luminary” (Nicholas Kallincos, Australia, 10 mins.)
A reclusive, light bulb-headed entomologist passes his days reading self-help books and desperately searching for the luna moth, the one specimen missing from his precious collection. A kooky, tragicomical love story using stop-animation, “The Luminary” takes the expression “like a moth to a flame” to a whole new level. When the entomologist finally encounters a luna moth, albeit a life-sized one wearing lipstick and a come-hither expression, the two fall in love—he for her rarity and she for the luminescence that radiates from his head. They share a tender moment or two but when they kiss, the heat of their embrace vaporizes the moth and nearly blows the entomologist’s fuse. A bittersweet tale of passion gone awry, this film beckons the warning “be careful what you wish for.”
“Never Like the First Time!” (Dir. Jonas Odell, Sweden, 15 mins.)
“Never Like the First Time!” is a mixed-media documentary that follows four voices as they tell the stories of their first sexual encounters. Odell claims he made the film in response to "the claustrophobic fantasy world that too often is the world of animation.” The first two stories are fairly conventional—a guy loses his virginity at a party, while his braggart friend fumes and a girl and her long-term boyfriend spend a year and a half building up to sex only to be completely let down. The third narrative is told using only black-and-white with rotoscope and recounts a young woman’s rape by an older man in a blasé, almost cheerful manner. It was heart-wrenching to relive that moment, especially because of her calmness, as she tried to remember exactly what happened on that drunken evening. In the end she wonders whether she lost her virginity at all. Leading us out of the gloom for the final piece, Odell ends with the story of a 92-year-old man, whose experience is told through a collage of vintage advertisements and cut-outs. His first time is completely transformative and as his voice reaches new crescendos of excitement, so too does the world around him become alive and magnificent once again.
“Ice Floe” (Claude Barras and Cédric Louis, Switzerland, 7 mins.)
Haunted by the judgmental looks and callous laughter of those around her, a young, overweight girl escapes the scrutiny and summer heat by creating a fantasy world of ice floes and obese penguins, where she can bundle up in her winter coat and tune out the surrounding barrage of slimming advertisements and pipe-cleaner thin beach-goers. Animated with harsh, Picasso-esque shapes and configurations, our doomed heroine eventually meets her demise by heat stroke in her winter attire. Her death, while poignant and sad, is also a release and her corpse wears a smile as she’s put into a freezer at the morgue, finally able to return to her fantasy world for good.
“Guide Dog” (Bill Plympton, US, 6 mins.)
A follow up to the Oscar-nominated “Guard Dog,” this film takes our protagonist through the tumultuous world of the blind leading the blind. A slobbering, manic blob of a canine, this doggie is as overzealous as he is ill-fated. His first attempt at leading a blind man result in his being carried off by chirping, fanatic birds. The dog begs for another shot, gets it, only to have his second victim get creamed by a street-sweeper. Panicked and increasingly desperate, the dog races his third victim around the city, not stopping for cars or malevolent birds, and brings him back safely. The intensity of the “walk” proves too much for the old man, however, and he collapses from a heart attack, even as our hero performs mouth-to-mouth and uses a defibrillator to try and revive him. Humorous and quirky, this film shows that lending a helping hand can sometimes lead to disastrous outcomes.
“The Lost Bag” (Jean-Luc Greco and Catherine Buffat, France, 14 mins.)
A fable based on a medieval sermon from 1260, “The Lost Bag” tells the tale of a merchant who has sold all his possessions and now only has a sack of gold, which he accidentally leaves in a church to chase after a woman in the corn fields. A man finds the sack and, torn over what to do, decides to post a sign up on his door hoping the rightful owner will claim it. The merchant comes, decides he doesn’t want the gold after all and the other man chases him around town shouting, “thief!” and enlisting all the other townspeople to help capture him. After much bloodshed and bruising, the merchant is caught and given back his bag, in an anti-climatic feet-shuffling scene before the crowd dissipates and all returns to normal. Using what looked like wood carvings, the blocky, lopsided figurines in this animation were visually stunning and partially made up for the lackluster ending.
“The Danish Poet” (Torill Kove, Canada, 15 mins.)
Pondering the nature of coincidence as it relates to our lives, “The Danish Poet” embarks on a journey of discovering the nuances and obstacles of how one comes into existence. A struggling Danish poet, Kaspar, is searching for inspiration by visiting his favorite author in Norway. He is sidetracked by a cute, Rapunzel-like farm girl who is unhappily engaged to a gap-toothed brute. A series of random catastrophes must ensue (including a hungry goat, a careless postman, her husband being crushed by a cow, and a funeral) before the two are reunited again. A sugary, sentimental narrative infused with enough background humor to sustain it, “The Danish Poet” is an enjoyable foray into the cartoon world of kismet.
“McClaren’s Negatives” (Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre, Canada, 10 mins.)
An homage to the innovative Scottish-Canadian animator, Norman McClaren, this film uses interview-style voiceovers interweaved with jazz riffs and raucous, grungy techniques to give insight into the methods and madness of McClaren, who was the first person to paint directly onto negatives in order to give each frame a tonal quality that was vibrant and original. “It’s the motion that I’m in love with” says McClaren as he visually translates a musical number onto negatives, combining sound and screen in remarkable, dreamlike ways. His process was reminiscent of the trippy, pink elephant scene in Dumbo where he’s had too much to drink and it isn’t clear if he’s hallucinating or dreaming.
“One Rat Short” (Alex Weil, US, 10 mins.)
This touching, tragic love story is about…rats. Chasing a Cheetos bag through the foul, gritty subways of New York, our protagonist accidentally becomes trapped in an animal testing facility, where he meets another rat and falls madly in love with her. Going from the dark darks of the city into the sterile, bright whites of the laboratory, this completely digital animation runs the gamut of emotional intensity and retains all the evocative elements of any great biped love story. With clarity and precision, we watch the protagonist fight to save himself and his love from the cycloptic, Big Brother machine that monitors the rats’ activities. Distracted by the same bag of Cheetos, the machine temporarily shuts down, unlocking all the cages and inciting a cacophonous rat riot. The two lovers are nearly at the exit when the machine wakes up again and only one can escape. A melancholy tale of hope and despair, “One Rat Short” is possibly the only film about rats, barring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that is capable of bringing me to the verge of tears.
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