Talk to the Snail

“Wanted”

Thursday morning’s screening at Ottawa’s ByTowne Cinema showcased fifteen Canadian shorts, hence the title Canadian Showcase.

You know, often when I’m at a festival, or watching a cartoon pitch here in Burbank, or even a DVD of shorts at home, I’ll use a “morning after” test. Sure, the films could be a lot terribly interesting as you’re watching them, but, more often than not, when you try to remember them the next morning, they start to blur around the edges. So today, four days after the Canadian Showcase, I’m not surprised I need to go back through the festival catalog to remind myself what I watched. This says less about the specific films and their filmmakers, but more about how difficult it is to create a memorable pieces of work, ones that will leave lasting impressions, like “The House of Small Cubes” and the festival’s winner of the Grand Prize for Best Student Animation, “I Slept with Cookie Monster”, both from the opening night.

The ByTowne Cinema

Matching the catalog’s thumbnails with the titles, I don’t recall too negative a reaction to any of the fifteen shorts. As with anything, I’ve got one over-riding criticism of most films – it’s they run long. I think that’s the case with three of the screening’s most ambitious films: David Coquard-Dassault’s “L’ondée (Rains)”; “Hungu” by Nicolas Brault (watch the making of); and Neil Burns’s “The Nose”. For instance, I bet Neil could’ve accomplished what he needed in his film, based on a short story by Gogol, in half of its eighteen minutes.

I remember enjoying well Line Severinsen’s “Wanted”, her student film at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, as well as “Triumphant Campaigns of Captain Cudney” (except the ending) by Kyle Marshall. The fact these two films were the screening’s most accessible (i.e. the most like you’d see on TV) says much about my laymen-like tastes, I reckon. They were also, along with a pair of “Intergalactic Who’s Who” shorts by Kevin D.A. Kurytnik and Carol Beecher, the morning’s funniest. (While I liked the “Intergalactic” pieces, something about them stopped me from liking them even more. I couldn’t put my finger on it.)

“Ha’aki”

The media were all over the place, too, including puppets, cut-outs, paint on glass, rotoscope, and something called pencil on paper. Funny, I hardly ever take notice of a film’s medium, especially when they’re engaging otherwise. However, I always am continuously conscious of rotoscoping (although, I wouldn’t know if I didn’t notice the rotoscoping if I didn’t notice the rotoscoping, I admit).

Also included in the screening were Malcolm Sutherland’s “Forming Game” (watch the making of), “Ha’aki” by Iriz Pääbo (watch), “Les oiseaux, le vent, l’orage” by Éloi Ménard (watch), “Labyrinth” by Patrick Jenkins, “Let Me Do This One” by Dominic-Etienne Simard, Rose Bond’s “Electrolux”, Kim Anderson’s “The Fall”, and Neels Britz’s “Trek”.

– Eric