Talk to the Snail

“The Control Master”

On Thursday, after the Canadian Showcase at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, I stuck around the ByTowne Cinema for Short Competition #5, the second of five shorts screenings, again with fifteen films of various media (ex. cut-outs, ink on paper, CG, and, for the first time this year, a pair of Flash films) in a range of categories (ads, narrative shorts, experimental, student work, etc.) with a bunch of countries represented (Japan, Scandanavia, France, the USA, and so forth).

“Camera Obscura”

Again, a solid hour and a half of cartoons. Highlights for me included Run “Rabbit” Wrake’s “The Control Master”, Koji Yamamura’s “Kodomo No Keijijogaku (A Child’s Metaphysics)”, “Camera Obscura” by Matthieu Buchalski, Jean-Michel Drechsler, and Thierry Onillion (watch it), and Felix Massie’s “Keith Reynolds Can’t Make it Tonight” (watch), a Welsh undergraduate short which you can see here. It and Wrake’s film were my favorites of the screening.

I enjoyed seeing again Mike Foran’s Net10 ad (see) and David Hulin’s spot for FedEx (the carrier pigeon one) (view). Yuichi Ito’s CG promo for Blueberry Eye was fun, too.

“Kodomo No Keijijogaku (A Child’s Metaphysics)”

You can see the music video for Mika’s “Lollipop” here. The short is by the French quintet of animators, Bonzom. And “Maraka”, by David Wachtenheim and Glen Steinmacher, was even funnier in a packed theater than on SNL (gander on it here). Generally, experimental films aren’t my cup of tea (nor are they interesting to the folks in the audience who use the screen time as an opportunity to text their pals), but I enjoyed both Richard Negre’s “En Attendant (Waiting For)” and “The Idiot Stinks” by Helder K. Sun.

I was into “This Way Up” by Smith and Foulkes until about two-thirds through when I felt the film went off track. See a preview of it here.

The two Flash films were the aforementioned “Keith Reynolds” and Jan Lachauer and Max Lang’s “Sámpi”, also an undergraduate film, this one from Germany.

The screening  kicked off with a five and half minute high school film by Will Inrig, “The Depose of Bolskivoi Hovhannes” (watch). Good job, Will. You’re clearly making more of your youth than I did of mine. The screening ended with Don Hertzfeldt’s latest, the twenty-minute “I Am so Proud of You”. Now, I’m in the minority, it seems, in reaction to his last film, “Everything Will Be OK” (I didn’t like it), but I enjoyed this one well enough. I’m going to guess Hertzfeldt is a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, especially Slaughterhouse-Five. While the fashion of non-linear story-telling Vonnegut helped popularize is certainly not uncommon, I did walk away from “Proud” with the same notion of all history’s moments happening concurrently as I do after much of Vonnegut’s work. (Plus, the protagonists’ names in both “Proud” and Slaughterhouse are Billy.) Whether the Hertzfeldt has read any Vonnegut or not, I don’t know, but it sure seems the pair are cut from the same cloth. In any event, I’m looking forward to the next chapter in his Hertzfeldt’s animated opus.

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– Eric