CIFF 2012: Shorts Program: Animation: Blurring the Lines

The shorts programs are always hit and miss for me. This year the animation styles were pretty good and had lots of variety, although as in many shorts the stories often had open endings or surreal tales.

38-39 c (S. Korea/US)--I don't think I've seen any short films from South Korea before. I believe the filmmaker is a Korean American student. The title is the temperature in a bathhouse. There is no dialogue, so the synopsis of the short "A birthmark forms a bond between father and son in an old public bathhouse" tells me more than I got out of it. There was no real indication to me that the two characters were father and son. This film was mostly portrayed via images melding into something else, going in a roundabout way from the son's birthmark to his father's.

Bite of the Tail (US)--A woman suffers from a mysterious stomach ailment but her doctor is distracted and not very interested, giving her vague diagnosis and cures. Her husband also is not very interested in her health either. He spends his time in an empty lot trying to catch a snake when he should be working. The snake metamorphoses into symbolism of the woman's ailment, whether it is physical or mental I don't know.  This story to me feels very autobiographical.

The Conquerors (Canada/France)--A surreal landscape where a man and woman live as if they are on a desert island, eventually birthing several kids, making pets out of giant insects, battling nature and other creatures. The people are real and although everything else is rendered via CGI, they still have the style of clip art type images cut out of a book.

Old Man (US)--The filmmaker got her hands on taped telephone recordings of Charles Manson and splices them into a rambling conversation, with animation to personify what he is saying.

Edmond was a Donkey (Canada/France)--Meek Edmond is picked on at work and daydreams of escaping to a fantasy land. When his coworkers covertly put donkey ears on him, this seems to change Edmond into a more extroverted and confident person, despite his ridiculous appearance. When the ears are taken away, Edmond returns to depression.  It won the Gold Plaque for Animated Short at the fest.

Oh Willy (Belgium/France)--A man returns to his natural tendencies and to his mother who lives in a nudist commune. When she dies it distresses him and he runs off into the forest where he befriends a big hairy creature. After giving it a good shave, he finds the creature is pretty much like himself. Made entirely of felt and fabric and other textiles and natural materials, which looked like it was a lot of handwork, and deserving of its Silver Hugo for Best Animated Short.

Body Memory (Estonia)--Creatures made of string are trapped in some kind of boxcar shack. Their strings start unraveling as they try to prevent being unraveled entirely. Some string creatures are wound around an egg, suggesting they are mother types with a pregnant belly.  This film has the same feel of other Eastern European short film artists such as Jan Svankmajer, Jiri Barta, Jiri Trnka, as well as a bit of Ray Harryhausen.

The Pub (UK)--Dialogue at a pub is animated in a rotoscope style. A female bartender has to deal with drunks, rowdy football hooligans, a bachelorette party and other types that congregate at bars.

Next Door Letters (Sweden)--Two girls play a joke on a third girl by sending her a fake love letter from a boy. When the victim is genuinely interested, one of the mean girls feels bad and continues the charade through letters in order not to hurt her feelings; she feels guilty enough to want to confess but ultimately writes that "his" family has to move away. Later the jokester, now a grown up lesbian, tries to track the girl down to reconnect and apologize.  This one, too, felt like an autobiographical story of the filmmaker or someone they knew.