Talk to the Snail

 Yo Gabba Gabba - “The Train Ride”

Okay. Thursday afternoon’s Short Competition #5 ends and I head over to some theater in a mall to take in the next screening, Kids Competition – TV. I’d say there were around 200 folks in attendance, with maybe a dozen kids under the age of thirteen. With a 5:00 p.m. screening on a Friday, you’d kind of expect that, I guess. I don’t know how many kids turned out for the competition’s repeat on Saturday afternoon.

Sixteen cartoons were shown, a full eleven of which were music videos from Yo Gabba Gabba! That’s fine, I guess. They were all good (you’ve probably seen a bunch) and they deserved to be there. And, since I wasn’t going to make the Yo Gabba Gabba! presentation Saturday morning (’There’s a Party in My Tummy”), this was another way for me to get in on the Gabbapalooza. The YGG! filmmakers included Kangaroo Alliance, Parker Jacobs & Kris Boban, Hobo Divine, Aaron Stewart, Willy Hartland, Arthur Jones, Jesse LeDoux, Bran Dougherty-Johnson, Pandapanther, and a pair by Friend-of-Frederator Joel Trussell. Sitting there, I thought, “I wonder if a couple hundred adults would’ve turned out in 1973 for an hour and a half dedicated to Schoolhouse Rock cartoons?” I bet that wouldn’t have happened.

 ”The Bunjies”

The balance of the screening included Andreas Hykade and Ged Haney’s “The Bunjies”, Jakob Schuh and Saschka Unseld’s “Angel Afoot”, and Karsten Kiilerich’s “Was Denkst Du über Arm und Reich? (Things You Think ‘Poor and Rich’)”. (If I didn’t make a spelling error somewhere in there, it’s a miracle.)

Also in the mix was the Cartoon Network pilot, “The Upstate Four”, by Fran Krause. The eleven-minute short ultimately won the festival’s Best TV Animation for Kids prize. (Aside: it would be convenient if the festival’s official site would have the winners listed, front and center, but it doesn’t.) “The Upstate Four” is funny, has an engaging lead character (at least, Mary, a squirrel, is the center of this episode), and is simultaneously both out of the ordinary and accessible. (By the way, Cartoon Network decided not to run with the project as a series, unfortunately for us. Oh. And as much as I enjoyed “The Upstate Four”, I may’ve liked the Krause Brothers’ “Utica Cartoon” for Cartoon Network years ago even more.)

The biggest misfire of the whole festival, for me, was the inclusion of the twenty-one-minute Korean film, “Wanted”, by Woonki Kim, in the Kids Competition (I’m not sure I’d include it in any screening, but that’s not the point here.) I’ve decided I’d rather not meet the child who’d be entertained by this short, an allegory to the government’s response to some recent natural disasters (I think; I wasn’t too sure what was going on, even with title cards at the end explaining what I had just watched). I know at least one kid in the theater was disturbed and I can’t blame her (“Honey, I’m an old man and I’m right there with you.”). Were the kids TV cartoons submitted for consideration and not accepted so lame they couldn’t compete with this? It was a huge disappointment and made me question whether I wanted to head to the Kids Competition – Short Films later in the festival.

To end things on a positive note, here’s a picture of Canada’s Parliament Building, by popular request.

– Eric