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World Animation 1

Not a bad start to my festival, but not an entirely auspicious one either – a fair amount of pretension, topped and tailed by more entertaining stuff. I should check the catalogue to get more information, and if I remember, I’ll look up the filmmakers, but first impressions:

Started with a very cute, high-end texture & 3D CG animation, Hum, which worked well in itself, although short films about little lonely machines that construct other little machines for company, and variations thereof, are becoming very familiar. I should check, maybe it’s one guy being very prolific. I’m not complaining, but it suggests that the criteria for selecting these shorts is dominated by the animation, not how they stand up as stories – as films in their own right.

The second, a slightly Matrix-y SF piece, Glitch, seemed to be betraying small screen origins, but was probably more hamstrung by the three lines of dialogue that could have been left out – the sound mix seemed shaky with the dialogue, oddly, and it had a simple enough story with a nice (visual) payoff.

The next, Down The Road, had the opposite problem – it could have been quite a neat two-hander as a live action short, with good enough actors and less semaphoring of the plot twists, but died a death within the confines of some distinctly lo-fi animation better suited to comedy than a thriller.

Canvas had some very strong stop-motion model-work. But unless there was something going on about commenting on how artworks will revolt against pretentious artists, just plain pretentious.

My Love, an atmospheric Russian animation, with a dreamlike sensibility, but either that or something missing from the translation resulted in a slightly uneven narrative – it always kind of felt there was a scene missing. I’m not sure if it expected you to know the source (if there was a source).

The last short, a Canadian production, while neither visually nor narratively original or stunning, was funny, in a straightforwardly daft surrealist way, with a very cartoony style. See, I’m shallow – I always like the laughs over the pretentious noodlings over the nature of the creative process.