Fantasia 2024.08: "You Don't Read Enough", Darkest Miriam, "Piggy 1/2", Animalia Paradoxa, Rita, and This Man

Two sets of photos from the first show of the Day!

First up, the co-writer/director/star of "You Don't Read Enough", Emilia Michalowska, and co-writer/director Noa Kozulin, who commented that they were both the children of immigrants whose mothers both said the title to them on the regular.

After the feature, programmer Carolyn Mauricette welcomed Darkest Naomi writer/director Naomi Jaye and original novelist Martha Baillie; like the title character of Jaye's film, both Mauricette & Baillie have been library workers, mentioning that you find a lot of people in real life like in the film, waiting at the door for them to open in the morning and hanging around until closing time. They talked about how it was a tricky adaptation because the novel took the form of various incident reports, which wouldn't translate to film.

And we finish with Mitch talking to Rita director Jayro Bustamante. The film hails from Guatemala, which is a small country that doesn't have a lot of infrastructure for even a film of this scale, especially one where the cast was almost entirely young girls: They basically had to create an academy from the ground up - with 500 prospective actresses! - and then cast the graduates. If I recall correctly, roughly half made it into the film in one way or another, and some were finding other work since.

There were a number of folks from Guatemala in the audience - well-represented in the Q&A period, especially - which added something to the "thank you for this movie" intros which I often find kind of odd (especially when it's more or less the entire comment). There are variations on scandals like this all over the world - Native American boarding schools in Canada and the U.S., church-run sweatshops in Ireland, etc. - but it's got to be weirdly gratifying to see your small country's horror story memorialized well enough to play foreign film festivals because that probably means it is well-done enough to stick at home.


"You Don't Read Enough"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

I love that the title of this short would be comprehensible nonsense even if it's not actually mentioned within the film; there are just things about parental relationships of this sort that feel universal even if the specifics are extremely personal and random. The actual story is basically nonexistent: At 4:10pm, Kasia (Emilia Michalowska) gets a call from her Polish-immigrant mother saying she'll be home in about twenty minutes. This does not happen, and Kasia worries, resolves not to worry, and worries some more, all while thinking about how fraught their relationship has been.

The kick to it, though, is the moment when she starts thinking about what a burden would be lifted if something has happened to her mother, and the presentation and cutting is close to marvelous, keeping this undercurrent of guilt as opposed to doing a hard cut in and out of a pleasant reverie, but that's not how it works most of the time. It's just enough to have the ending bit not just be an amusing anticlima.


Darkest Miriam

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Titles are funny; this movie with the name "Darkest Miriam" really didn't do much for me, but seeing in the end credits that the original novel was named "The Incident Report" made it click into place a bit more. How often is the title a marketing tool and how often is it the hub to which one is connecting the other pieces of the story? It doesn't change the movie much, but it does reframe it.

The audience doesn't hear much from Miriam Gordon (Britt Lower), dark or otherwise at first, as she leaves home and bikes to the library where she works, near a nice park in the center of Toronto, leading story hours and reshelving books. Soon, though, she is giving a list of the various oddballs who frequent the branch but still mostly reserved. Things change, though, when a fellow cyclist knocks her into a hole that has been excavated in the street and she stares up, dazed, for some time. The next morning, she awkwardly leaves her medical examination over the personal questions, but she seems okay and more assertive, actually approaching the cute slovenian cabbie/artist, Janko Priajtelj (Tom Mercier) who often takes lunch in the park at the same time.

Apparently the novel consists of the incident reports of the title, letting the documentation of something odd happening in the library and elsewhere rather that focusing on Miriam directly, and they're the moments of the film that often have the most punch: They're where we get to hear Miriam's voice and get a point of view that's wry rather than flat, and Lower's delivery is arch enough to emphasize both the remove and the insight into her mind. Once the film finishes, it can maybe sink in that it's been a series of incidents to be filed away and sorted, discrete and more indicative of the larger world than the entirety of her story.

Britt Lower is great, at least, slowly adding to what initially seems like an informed blankness as the film goes on, occasionally displaying a powerful anxiety as she realizes just how blank she maybe is. Through long stretches where one maybe starts to wonder if this is leading anywhere, she, at least, is always fascinating. She and Tom Mercier play well off each other, with Lower, Mercier, and screenwriter/director Naomi Jaye having a good sense of how to make Janko pushy and prickly where Miriam tends to retreat without looking like he's steamrolling her. They don't have to be soulmates here, just a couple folks who at least work together now, and the film is comfortable at that level.

They and the interactions with relatively random folks at the library work well enough that it can sometimes highlight that Jaye doesn't do quite so well when it's time to unambiguously center Miriam. The story that has her at the center (a stalker placing unnerving letters in books) is too centered around a reference rather than her interactions with people; unpacking her past happens piecemeal and often in quiet, possibly-metaphorical images and memories that aren't quite flashbacks. There's a certain logic to it - Miriam is who she is in large part due to things that happened at a slight remove, rather than to her directly - but it makes it possible to disengage.

I never did, not entirely, but it was hard not to feel that while the film created a number of small segments that mostly work together, the effect was often not to increase their importance in the moment but to diminish the larger tragedies. One can get to the end and feel like it should have been more affecting.


"Piggy ½"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Animation Pllus, laser DCP)

Writer Kuo Po-shen and director Fish Wang are not exactly subtle with their intentions in "Piggy ½"; it's a science-fiction film that is meticulously constructed to make a specific point, and that construction is heavy-duty: They do not want to simply posit a world that makes the horrors of ours sharper by creating analogs that feel truthful because of their intent, but a machine where you can see each part working, how they interact, and how they came to be constructed. Where some might avoid that level of detail lest a viewer feel that some specific piece invalidates the point or causes the story to fall apart, they apparently consider rigor convincing.

They're not wrong, although it can make bits slow going as anthropomorphic piglets Bob and Mei await the "ritual" that will determine whether they and the others of their generation will be become laborers or "canned goods", because their homeland does not have enough resources to support them all. Bob, in particular, is a natural rabble rouser and rebel, but his defiance and exile will, if nothing else, help sharpen his instincts as he learns more of what goes on behind the curtain maintained by the priests.

There's a lot of work to do, getting all the world-building in and also building it as an adventure for Bob and creating some nifty images. Wang doesn't exactly do two things at once all that much, so things can be rather deliberate at times, not so much obviously shifting from one gear to another, but concentrating very hard on the current goal, even as it shifts to new goals cleanly. It's never dull, though; the designs and animation are quite nice, the voice work is strong and emotional even if you're getting the actual dialogue from subtitles because you don't speak mandarin, and the finale is suitably big and bold. It maybe meanders a bit there, but a viewer can enjoy the audacity of it without worrying too much about it undercutting the central metaphor.


Animalia Paradoxa

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground/Animation Plus, laser DCP)

Animalia Paradoxa is the sort of movie where, after a certain point, each fade to black has the audience wondering if the movie's done. Not necessarily because one is ready after a half hour or so (though one may be), but because the story is wispy enough and so much about examining its present rather than pushing to a conclusion that it could be. When it doesn't, for better or worse, you repeat the process in another ten minutes or so.

It takes place in an urban dystopia, the sort of place where seemingly only the most blandly brutalist buildings have survived, although with enough density that there's not much chance of seeing anything other than a sky that is never anything other than gray. Somehow, an amphibious humanoid has wound up in the center of all this, trying to gather enough water from scant rain and occasional leaking pipes to take the occasional bath, scavenging food and trinkets which he can use for trade, hoping to find a way back to the sea.

Filmmaker Niles Atallah doesn't necessarily leap straight into this creature's tale, though, opening with stop motion that leads to found footage of newsreels and educational footage, kind of building one of those things where the main narrative is a couple layers deep so that one doesn't take it quite so literally or as hard science fiction, although it's not really necessary. These bookends and occasional digressions are enjoyable enough in their own right, and they're where the various different artists and craftsmen who came together to make this film get to show their stuff. It's dark but playful in the same way as Guy Maddin or Jan Svankmajer.

There's plenty to like in the main film between those bits; it's the sort of mixed media creation that intrigued by its juxtaposition of marionette, contortion, and stop-motion animation, the exaggeration and decay especially effective in this post-apocalyptic setting, where you're never entirely sure whether the world is now populated by actual mutants or just a twisted society. There's an impressive manner of getting a lot out of a little; our amphibian protagonist gets a lot of mileage out of a mask, grippy-lookimg sneakers, and odd posture, for example.

It's a slight story, though; this creature and many of the humans it interacts with are silent, and thus any goal of teaching the sea rather than just surviving day to day has to be inferred from relatively little. The residents of this crumbled city are more a handful of interesting designs than a community, as is the big (and striking to watch!) finale. It's also dusty and gray enough that one might think the film is black and white until the occasional hit of color, so the film will only occasionally startle with its incentive world.

It's kind of boring, really, a piece of art that often demands a lot of investment for relatively scant returns. This sort of thing isn't particularly meant to be mainstream or commercial, but it would be nice if all of the individual pieces performed some sort of alchemy as they came together to become an interesting movie rather than nifty little bits.


Rita

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Rita is better than a lot of films where the push is how true and important the story is. That's perhaps both because of and despite how magic-realist the film is; if you can get through the first ten or fifteen minutes where it is practically shouting how eccentric and fantastical it is, it manages to establish the right amount of distance and not be an exercise in fetishistic recreation of atrocities. It's familiar, in some ways, to the audience which will actually seek out and watch this film, and the challenge is to make an impression, which it meets.

It opens with a police vehicle driving deep into the Guatemalan jungle to a fortress; the prisoner, Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) is a 13-year-old girl who has run away from home and has now fought back against her father because he was targeting her even younger sister. She's assigned to a room where the girls where angel wings, and after some hazing, the other girls - tall, abrasive Sulmy (Ángela Quevedo), young Bebé (Alejandra Vásquez), leader Terca (Isabel Aldana) - begin to accept her, and in fact believe she is to be a crucial part of their plan to flee and stage a protest on international Women's Day.

The angel wings and other dorms where girls sport different fantastical accouterments are not entirely for show; there's a current of magic realism in the film that is maybe a little stronger than just symbolism. Even with all that, though, the film is still at its most affecting when it's matter of fact, with young teenagers speaking plainly about their abortions or having the staff taking glamor photos of the inmates that they more or less openly exploit. The filmmakers do pretty well in terms of finding a way to both give the villains respectable veneers and also play up how a lot aren't actually hiding.

The young cat is pretty darn good, especially when you consider they are almost all not just making their debuts but basically spent a few months learning the trade because Guatemala doesn't have much of a film industry. Giuliana Santa Cruz and Ángela Quevedo, the young ladies playing Rita and Sulmy, respectively, could become stars if there's any opportunity for them, displaying toughness that never feels like just imitating adults. The adults are solid enough, too, but after thinking about the film, it's impressive how much they stay back most of the time, letting the young women be front and center for their story. A climactic scene views them almost entirely through bars even as they're driving the action (or, in a way, inaction); they are not the focus here.

It's a grim film even with the veneer of fantasy and bursts of action and activity; writer Jayro Bustamante stays resolutely on-message, by and large avoiding moments of relief when some sort of good fortune gets Maria or one of the other girls out of trouble. There is something unsettling on how he makes use of the vast majority of the cast being adolescents - it's a tropical climate with no air conditioning so the girls are often stripped down but there's a sense that there are adults enjoying the view - which increases the creep factor without necessarily having to pummel with cruelty, and he's also good at creating a thrill when the girls put a plan into action. He also often twists the knife by having visitor's days that show the nice woman who had taken Rita in, just to point out that there could be a better way, and this system is designed to maximize cruelty rather than solve problems.

In some ways, the scene that's going to stick with me is one of the simplest and most against the grain, as a bus full of people pulls a girl in and tries to protect her; for all the power evil has in this movie, it is still hiding and covering up, because those are people's instincts, and one hopes the world can remember that. Rita is far from a hopeful movie, but it's one that recognizes that evil is not a universal constant.


This Man

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

What the hell happened to Japanese horror? It used to be a major draw for genre festivals like this and surprisingly strong on home video, full of stylish images and genuine dread on the one end and nutty Yoshihiro Nakamura gore on the other, and this year there only were only live-action movies in the genre at Fantasia this year and one of them is this thing. I mean, it's horror - someone should be doing something weird and interesting!

It gives us a somewhat extended introduction to Yoshio Yasaka (Minehiro Kinomoto) and his eventual wife Hana (Arisa Deguchi) before introducing others - schoolgirl Rei (Miu Suzuki), teacher Nishino Yoshikawa), Yoshio's co-worker Anatsuji, Hana's friends Amie and Saki, etc. People around them start dying gruesome deaths, and word gets around that some had been speaking with their therapists about seeing the same man in their dreams before they died. As the police have no leads on a seemingly supernatural phenomenon, and people around the Yasakas begin to fall, they eventually consult with freelance sorcerer Unsui for answers.

That it sort of starts off from the same premise as the more respectable Dream Scenario is most likely bad luck, but not only does this not have the Japanese equivalent of Nicolas Cage, it doesn't have any really interesting characters, just some generic types whose intersections seem random and whose impulses to kill are random but not disconcertingly so. There's no recognizable hook to its mayhem, whether it be a darkly understandable motive or character one feels some particular affinity for, or even dread at the nihilistic meaninglessness of it. Like another recent horror movie, In a Violent Nature, it's the surface of the genre, the gory aftermath of attacks and the arcane remedies, with anything for those signifiers to represent stripped out.

That other movie was at least competent in its filmmaking; This Man mostly feels sloppy. It turns out to be very easy to get lost or think that something might be significant when it's not when there's nothing that demands particular emphasis, and the human brain tends to see patterns where none exists in that case. I've got a note about how many women in the film are wearing yellow sundresses, for instance, but it's not a trigger or the sort of wardrobe choice that helps one tell a number of characters with the same figure and haircut apart, but just a seemingly random choice that makes the movie more confusing than it has to be.

The filmmakers don't seem up to making its supernatural weirdness weird. When a cop jumps to "malevolent dream entity" as fast as one does here, that's a story that this movie isn't telling, and one can't help but think of what Kiyoshi Kurasawa would have done with reports that this was escalating. The world sure wouldn't have looked as normal as it does from that point, for sure. And while the filmmakers probably couldn't afford something like the exorcism at the end of It Comes, what they do instead is just a poor substitute, almost a comical parody of how often we've seen these repeated Buddhist prayers showing how it's the pacing, editing, and sound design that make those scenes work, because there's no power in their absence.

Maybe I'm unfairly comparing it to classics here, but festival selection is a filter, and this feels like something that wouldn't have passed through in previous years. It's got the surface aspect of those J-horror movies, but none of the chilling core that made them thrilling even before they had style applied ot them.

Fantasia 2022.17: Island of Lost Girls, The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai, Circo Animato, "The Cradle", Sadako DX, and Missing

I'm mildly surprised that the Schmidt family didn't make it to Montreal for Island of Lost Girls on Saturday morning. I imagine that Covid throws a wrench in that sort of thing, but I also suspect that if I'd somehow made a film with my family like this - I don't know that I'd quite call it backyard filmmaking because it's an awful big backyard - that got accepted into a major festival like Fantasia, a week in Montreal would absolutely be that year's summer vacation. I think of the Adams family with The Deeper You Dig three years ago - ike the Adamses, the Schmidts have been making movies as a hobby for a while, occasionally getting one into a festival even though it will almost certainly not get picked up for distribution or get much talked about aside from the dozens who see it in such situations. It isn't tagged with the "Fantasia Underground" label in the program, but it's underground as heck even if it's not the same tone and aesthetic as most stuff in that section. It might be a fun thing to have in the next BUFF, reaching out to family audiences.

Anyway, I would really have enjoyed the explanations of just how insane the making of this must have been, especially if they included a five-year-old shrugging off panicked questions from the audience by saying she is actually a much better swimmer than her character in the movie.

Tough-ish choice later in the day, as Heaven: To the Land of Happiness looks really good and has a heck of a cast and crew, but it might also quietly get a Blu-ray release or show up on Prime in the next few months, and the thing a block away at the Museum is kind of a tradition.

Hello, fifteen-film animation program, the thing that usually grinds these reviews to a halt even when work isn't busy! I love festival animation programs, because they often seem to be the purest expression of what people are imagining in the most concentrated forms. These things average six minutes or so and some are done by the time you've even got yourself prepared for what you're going to see.

Anyway, the guests, mostly directors, left to right: Grace An of "Baek-il", Karla Monterrosa of "Lo 100to", Omorose Osagie of "Glass Doll", Florentina Gonzalez" of "El After del Mudo", Shengwei Zhou of "Perfect City: The Mother", Sam Chou of "VRDLK: Family of Vurdulak", and "Deshabitada" producer Amanda Puga.

Many, but not all, were student films - An and Monterrosa both talked about drawing on something personal, while others wanted to make something that was far more a flight of fantasy. Chou said that he tried to make a very different film with each short, so apparently the rest aren't banter-y horror stories. Zhou mentioned that he actually really disliked doing "3D"/computer generated stuff, so it was apparently something satisfying to make that extra plastic.

After that, it was kind of an evening of avoiding things. I didn't really care about seeing the new Lena Dunham movie, Sharp Stick, so I went back to Hall for Sadako DX, even though I've never seen any Ring movie from any continent, and Dark Glasses was Dario & Asia Argento, whom I've never had any particular interest in (with the daughter kind of in the category of people whose work you don't really need to support if you don't have to), so I went with Missing, even though there was nothing else blocking its second screening.

Next up: Sunday, which may have wound up the longest day, with My Broken Mariko, One for the Road, Confession, Dobaaraa, and Seire.

Island of Lost Girls

Seen 30 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Island of Lost Girls is quite possibly the most insane movie I'll see at Fantasia this year, because, for the life of me, I can't see how the Schmidt family makes this thing safely without much more and better CGI than seems likely for this sort of backyard production. It's like Open Water except with pre-teen girls and elephant seals at various points, and then it somehow gets crazier on land.

The three girls are sisters Avila, Autumn, and Scarlet, orphans in a foster home, with Avila a fairly responsible tween while her sisters are mischievous (autumn) and pure chaos (Scarlet), with the latter two seeming to torpedo an interview with prospective adopters when they show up late. They convince Avila to sneak out to the beach, but while there, Scarlet gets pulled out in a current. Avila swims out on a surfboard to get her, with Autumn along because she's scared to be left alone, but the current takes them, and hours later, they find themselves approaching an island with a sea cave. From what they can see, it seems to be sheer cliffs on all sides, and getting to the lighthouse at the top looks like it would be daunting for fully-grown adventurers.

This family has done this sort of thing before - The Incredible Adventure of Jojo (and His Annoying Little Sister Avila) played the festival in 2015 and there's at least one other short listed on IMDB - so they presumably know what they're doing with their tools and what the kids can handle. There are a couple scenes where one or the other of the girls appears doubled, but for the most part, it's clearly them on the surfboard floating in open water or in caves tight enough that many in the audience may find themselves tense at the very thought of what a sudden surge of water could do. The work of cinematographer Heatha McGrath is not often fancy but it doesn't have to be, although going from one shot to another can get shaky and the filmmakers have a tendency to lose track of whichever girls aren't on screen when they get separated.

But, presuming this family wasn't actually putting their daughters in incredible danger, you really have to respect some of the bigger set pieces. There is one involving a tractor, a cave, a cliff, two of the girls, a starfish, and a crab that is legitimately jaw-dropping in its scale even as it has something straight out of a cartoon gag in the middle of it. There are people making $200M movies who could do with studying the stakes, clarity, and sense of danger of that centerpiece. A number aren't quite to that scale but are still genuinely impressive for how they obviously aren't hugely elaborate set-ups and serve to remind just how dangerous situations that the makers of big action movies frequently feel need to goosed can be.

You don't give a movie like this a star rating, because it is clearly the work of amateurs who are going to look bad when graded on the same scale as professionals: The filmmakers are often unable to manage what seems like basic shot-to-shot continuity, for instance, while the young cast is often in that zone where they're not really performers and don't have good lines to recite, but feel enough like real kids who aren't polished in any way to be authentic. Similarly, I can't imagine putting this movie in a multiplex and selling tickets, but it's a kind of amazing thing to stumble upon by accident with no idea what one is in for.

Tōge saigo no samurai (The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

A samurai film from one of Akira Kurosawa's assistant directors with the great Tatsuya Nakadai in a supporting role is not a thing one passes up, even if it does unintentionally serve as a reflection of the old ways and legends fading into history in a way that is perhaps not ignominious, but quiet. As with their subjects, this film's makers do not fear the new but perhaps are not quite up to cementing their legacy in grand fashion.

The year is 1867, and as it opens, shogun Tokugawa (Masahiro Higashide), recognizing the coming external threats to Japan, opts to cede power to the Emperor to create a stronger nation, although his allies are not so fast to do so, leading to civil war. Between the two powers lies Nagaoka, a small prefecture led by Tadayuki Makino (Tatsuya Nakadai), containing the crucial Enoki Pass. Though both Makino and chief retainer Tsugunosuke Kawai (Koji Yakusho) favor imperial rule personal, their allegiances lead them to attempt neutrality, a stance that likely will not work out nearly as well for Nagaoka as it does for Switzerland, whom "Tsugi" sees as an aspirational model.

Indeed, it is perhaps unusual in that the build-up to the final battle is perhaps its most exciting part, a lengthy middle where one gets to watch star Koji Yakusho inhabit his noble samurai, bathe in the respect and loyalty he earns, and see that his warrior's soul does not crave battle the way some other such figures seem to. He exemplifies the best of the samurai, and without a lot of posturing or stiff rectitude - or a particularly obvious monster for contrast - makes one understand that the system could have survived and thrive if more were like him. It's a performance from Yakusho that can appear effortless, with Kawai often coming across as modern and superlatively reasonable, but it's also one where the audience can see him thinking and striving to present himself as more calm and assured than he perhaps is.

As Kawai prepares for the inevitable battle, writer/director Takashi Koizumi gives Yakusho and his cast-mates small episodes to play out - encouraging a samurai who is a talented draftsman to explore his art, a visit to the geisha that Tsugi perhaps doesn't realize is awkward for wife Suga (Takako Matsu), an attempt to reason with their former allies where patience and reasonability meet their limits. They are, by and large, quiet moments, with Kawai and those around him recognizing that they stand at a crucial point in history and pondering that without a lot of pretension. Tsugi and Suga have no children, which seems a shame, although fitting, if they see themselves as a last remnant of the old Japan. There are lots of nifty little performances her, with Takoko Matsu's Suga perhaps the most interesting - she is clearly still trying to puzzle her husband out in some ways, such that after decades, they do not necessarily understand the details of their own love for one another. This may wind up being Tatsuya Nakadai's last credit - the 89-year-old legend slowed down but never stopped working before Covid-19, but that might understandably have kept him off film sets - and it's a dignified farewell if so, projecting dignity even as Makino yields the making of decisions to his retainers.

The final battle is perhaps, deliberately anticlimactic: For all Tsugi's intelligence and honor, and willingness to invest in Western weapons like a Gatling Gun, he cannot overcome an opponent that outnumbers him by this much, and in 1867, a relatively random wound is going to sideline him badly. Koizumi marshals the familiar elements of the grand battle - the maps that make clear what the combatants will need to do when the camera finally arrives on scene, the tense where each soldier knows that their war can quite easily end with one shot or slash, the stoic commanders swelling with pride and admiration for their soldiers - and plays them out, but also drains much of the tension. There is not much suspense in this last stand; just the feeling that it had to be made.

The age of the samurai almost ends with a whimper here, although Tsugi has at least helped Japan be able to conceive of something else. Similarly, one can see Japan losing its last links to a defining age of cinema as Koizumi and Nakadai wind their careers down, even if what comes next is also inevitable and worth supporting.

"Piece of Solitude"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

An impressive, wordless memory piece with a man left alone in his book-filled home, seemingly only engaging the rest of the world with the newspaper and, specifically, the crossword, which may not be the greatest habit for someone in that position, as some clue winds up sending him back to memories of how he got there.

The main figure in this stop-motion tale is clay, mostly, but the dominant motif around him is paper - if you want to stretch, even the buckling bookshelves around him may be made of cardboard. It suggests a life closed off inside academic pursuits, perhaps ignoring other things around him until he was that isolated, able to form as needed into a flat, abstract world or a twisted Escher print. Books file information away, contained neatly until someone lets them out, but the crosswords, they contain words that intersect and connect one idea to another, knowledge to memory to experience until there's no way to avoid how, perhaps, he may have been a coward.

Yes, I am probably reading too much into the crossword analogy, but I love them and it's an extra way in to what could seem like a standard, familiar story about an old man with regrets.

"Histoire pour 2 Trompettes" ("A Story for Two Trumpets")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

A delightful little film that fits a great deal of transformation and growing up into its five minutes, perhaps in part because, along with bouncy music by Chapelier Fou that pushes forward without seeming rushed, it feels like a lot of things that kids see or process as paths along the way - storybooks with a trail, board games, jigsaw puzzles, all things that a child will look at as things that lead from one thing to another, only the little girl at the center of it, breaking and making things along the way, is changing too.

Director Amandine Meyer apparently creates children's storybooks as well as short films, so it's not surprising that she knows the forms well enough to put them into motion and make them cross over, and knows when a kid watching it might enjoy a detour into some darkness. It's a neat little piece of work where growing up can sometimes be dangerous but still a magical journey.

"The Commute"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

Dang right I'm going to be fond of a movie that animates a transit map, especially since this one-minute flick is as much about the delight of transit maps as the travel itself, and how it's there whether they are apps on a phone or posters on a wall. I wouldn't be shocked if Toronto (or whichever city this represents) were to use this as a PSA on an animated billboard or the like; it's got that feel of whimsy without being a hard sell.

"Glass Doll"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

Omorose Osagie builds a nifty little tale here, a combination of storybook fantasy and post-apocalyptic tale, as the titular doll looks after her friends but also tries to find the eye that will make her whole - but what if the price is too steep?

It's a nifty-looking take on its world, something that works as both a literal fantasy and a sort of translation of what being discarded and left behind would be like for toys, with the design feeling like it would fit right into a Cartoon Network lineup. Osagie keeps the story for her short impressively tight despite it being an elaborate creation - for all that it's full of nifty detail and has fun things hiding in every corner, there's nothing wasted in the telling of the story, a perfect little tragedy that gets where it's going without any sort of unnecessary detour.

"BREAK bug"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

I hope visual effects artist Mchael Ralla used motion capture to animate his dancing robots and insects in "BREAK bug", because the film is, in its way, about a big ol' robot effectively doing motion capture from that little grasshopper, and it would be fun if this were actually that meta.

At any rate, it's fast-paced, has a beat, and while I'm not going to say whether it choreographs its simultaneous dance and action so that it it inevitably leads to a double-splat, the fact that one can see just how well Ralla has laid everything out and made it work together is impressive work as both direction and doing visual effects.

"VRDLK: Family of Vurdulak"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

This is based on a Tolstoy story from 1839, which is somewhat amusing because it is built to feel very modern and quippy and irreverent, the kind of horror that is so fond of nervous laughter on the one hand and being so dismissive of the supernatural that it's meant to be a bigger shock on the other that it's hard to truly settle into its world. Sam Chou's thriller is fun, don't get me wrong, but somehow shifting into animation exacerbates that unwillingness to simply be horrific just a little more.

It is kind of a ball, though, with a slick Don Bluth quality to the animation that says yes, they have inevitably been influenced by Disney but want to do something a little more intense, with enough of Tod Browning's Dracula in the DNA to feel like it's coming from the same place but not entirety trying to be the same thing. He and screenwriter Ellery Vandooyeweert do the thing where two sorts of genres intersect very well, with this foppish hero suddenly landing in the middle of a horror story while the villagers who know this stuff are annoyed with this noble dilettante, but the point is not necessarily that either is wrong to be who they are and must adjust to survive; they connect and effect each other but neither is ever exactly pulled out of their own milieu.

That's a neat sort of trick, and there's something to it - these sophisticated, devil-may-care aristocrats exist in the same world as the poor, superstitious commoners, but not entirely - although they never let it totally dominate the way that it's going to take a lot of luck and hard work to survive until morning.

"Baek-il"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

It's a genuine shock to go back into the program afterward and see that "Baek-il" is just two minutes long; for all that Grace An's twist on a piece of Korean folklore is snappily paced and doesn't particularly waste seconds as one watches it, there's enough going on that it feels broader and busier than that. She starts out with a passage stating that for these animals/spirits to become human, they must quarantine for 105 days - immediately connecting with something most in the audience will recall all too well - and then pops up "Day XX" enough times as Cat drives Bear up the wall in their isolation cave that it feels like it must go on longer. But, no, between her impressively sketched figures and great instincts for knowing when they should move and when they should stay still, she does a great job of underscoring just what a long freaking time that can be without actually making the audience wait it out to the point of being impatient themselves.

"Deshabitada"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

It initially feels like we're back in the same sort of space as "Piece of Solitude", albeit with a Chilean rather than Irani spin, but it turns out that the audience is in for a darker ride than that. This old woman's hunched figure implies guilt rather than just isolation, and filmmaker Camila Donoso leans on how concrete her sins are rather than making them complete abstractions. There are portions of this film where her deteriorating mind takes her to some seemingly fantastical dystopian settings, but more often than not, her memories are all too clear, playing on the banality of evil that pervaded Chile during the Pinochet years. What she did in her time was stark - and the clay-based animation is suitably gray and grotesque - but now that she's an old woman who cannot entirely function on her own, there's a real tension between what a functional society must do for everyone and what a just one may perhaps demand.

This is, I must admit, the sort of animated short one sees in a lot of programs that exist in part to demonstrate how animation can be used for weighty topics, to the point where it's become a bit of a genre unto itself. It's almost more interesting to look at it next to other similar films in the package and see how it handles the same sort of material as "Piece of Solitude" or others - in this case, impressively straightforward and unblinking, abstracted just enough to make the audience aware of just how deliberately distanced from reality these situations are, but just removed enough that the sort of visceral horror to be somewhat hit-or-miss.

"El After del Mundo" ("The World's After")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

Co-writer/director Florentina Gonzalez offers up one of the more compelling intersections of the supernatural and the post-apocalyptic here, presenting its ghosts as hollow sets of clothing who are in some ways continuing what they did in life and in others freed from it. Fluor is still basically still acting like a gig-economy delivery cyclist, but also more or less going where she wants, chasing new music to put on her phone, while Carlix remains at this old marine park, diligently reassembling a whale's skeleton. They meet, seemingly get on, but what comes next?

Gonzalez gives herself and her ghosts time to play with that, poking at the edges of how this world where post-millennials are continuing on in a world that's already gone might work but also teasing out a sort of hope: The world is past gone, and these two women are more or less ghosts adrift without responsibilities or futures to work toward, but they still find things worth continuing to exist for, even without it ever being likely to lead to something being fixed or remembered. There's disaffection and cynicism, but also an understanding that they go on, and do so as well as they can.

The style of the film is nifty, looking like something from the 1980s that maybe started from rotoscoping but didn't have the budget for truly elaborate animation over that; any given frame can sometimes look simple and crude, but Gonzales makes the characters' body language expressive despite the empty space where both faces and other glimpses of skin should be. The way Fluor and Carlix are both wearing tops with long sleeves with prominent cuffs at the end is a really clever bit of design, giving the illusion of hands and fingers so the audience accepts them manipulating things without actually seeing the fine detail. The music is also quite good, and overall, it's just an impressively balanced tale of how, even when nothing can be done, the way one chooses to exist can still mean something.

"Whisper Down the Lane"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

I didn't entirely see Raghad Al Barqi's short film as a game of telephone at first; the red string connecting characters came across as something more abstract even though the title was right up front while many of the objects floating in the background were means of communication. It's obvious in retrospect, although in the moment, the very concept of connection seemed more powerful to me, not so much how ideas get distorted as they go along. Ah, well.

It resolves into an intriguing short anyways, filling the screen with carefully and realistically rendered human figures and cutouts of various photographs but using the fact that this is animation and semi-abstract art to scatter them, both creating significance in how they are arranged and inviting the audience to mentally put them in some sort of order. The line often connects not phones but coffee cups, which feels like both an homage to how "telephone" is often represented by cups or cans at the end of such strings and how gossip often spreads, idly and over refreshments rather than actively, for a specific purpose. There's intriguing color coding, as if a jump from primarily-red imagery to primarily-blue is implying it's crossed a line.

It's the sort of thing that might be nifty to see in a museum installation; at just five minutes, one could easily sit through it twice, maybe picking up a bit more meaning the second time around.

"Lo 100to"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

It was vaguely reassuring when director Karla Monterrosa mentioned during the Q&A that this was in many ways constructed out of the secondhand chaos she heard other people talk about vis-a-vis their group texts, saying she doesn't really have something like this. Like, I don't either, but I hear people talk about theirs on social media like it's just an expected part of the world today. How'd we miss it?

That aside, it's a fun little cartoon, using doodles and art to illustrate the connection her avatar feels with everybody else she's linked to this way, even if they are far away and only sending these compacted bits of language and the occasional picture. On the other hand, the story itself and the way it gets buried - she's trying to communicate a broken engagement here! - is a nifty illustration of how, for as effective as this is in many ways, it doesn't always have the weight one wants. There's just no way to push across the importance of something amid the talking over each other and potential flood of far smaller issues. Like a lot of social media, it's something that feels like it should have the capacity for big ideas but can't help but be consumed by trivia, and dwelling on it for more than a couple of minutes isn't going to do any good.

"Perfect City: The Mother"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

There's some very neat stuff going on in here but the movie having a colon in the title doesn't do it a lot of favors; Shengwei Zhou has an interesting idea or three here and it's no problem that he's not exactly subtle getting them across, but it doesn't exactly feel as though playing in this sandbox more is going to reveal different nuances. It's a bit stretched as is; I don't know that I need more.

I like where his head's at, though, as a stop-motion forest spirit/creature, pregnant, starts taking in a liquid called "Perfect" - bright CGI yellow compared to the rest of the picture - and it eventually reshapes both. There's interesting stuff going on under the surface about parents striving to give their children advantages but as a result making both into something they don't quite recognize, rural people fed a steady diet of the city as aspirational that they get left behind. The visuals and how he uses them are nifty, from how the tree-creatures feel a bit monstrous to start but seem kind of comfortable once Zhou dives deep into the uncanny valley to make the more humanoid forms plastic and unnerving.

There's just a lot of it; this is very much the sort of movie where one can find themselves saying "yeah, I get it" halfway through and sitting around as it gets drawn out.

"The Principle of Sunrise"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

Every kid's first pet winds up more responsibility than expected, and that's what happens here, as a little girl takes an injured bluebird in and finds it growing to be more than she can handle, certainly within her home in the city, but returning it to nature is tricky, too.

Ye Song's movie has a nifty deadpan sense of humor and a blue color scheme that shows just how much this little creature means to its caretaker, on top of just being a cool-temperature look and emphasizing how much happens at night.

"New Moon"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)

Shorts like "New Moon" that take a monologue developed for the stage and visualize it are odd things - if it's worth adapting, the animation has a great chance of being superfluous, quite possibly detracting from the experience because it substitutes one thing for all the personal associations and such that can exist in the viewer's mind. That I can't say that happened for me here, although I do find that I remember Colman Domingo's voice more than the images that go with it.

It's a nice monologue and short, though, the sort that spends some time getting comfortable with the idea that these characters may not have a lot financially but how this doesn't bother young Colman particularly much because there's a lot of warmth between him and his mother to give him a solid foundation. One can sense him eliding the parts that are hard and seeing animators Jeremie Balais & Jeff LeBars giving a little extra vibrancy to his world.

"The Cradle"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, digital)

This is a nifty, atmospheric little piece where I don't know that I necessarily got the program's description from it - yes, that could be what's happening in retrospect, although I maybe saw "weird shut-in spinster" more than "witch" - but it doesn't much matter. Massimo Meo spends a fair amount of the short running time making the audience aware of what's missing, from not showing this old woman's head to the empty cradles to the faceless dolls, and that sense of incompleteness builds up quickly over the film's short running time. Throw some spooky photography that injects a bit of twitchiness into an orderly routine and sounds from outside drawing closer, and you've got a short, solid creeper.

Sadako DX

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

So, this franchise was a big deal back in the day, huh? I get that, like The Grudge, this series has perhaps not gotten bigger with subsequent entries, but rather seen its budget and attached talent slide so that it will continue to make a profit even as ticket sales diminish, but still, this is bad enough that it's hard to see where the original appeal of The Ring was. As someone happening on this for the first time, I can sort of see how there might have been something to it, but it's a shadow of its former self if so.

As it opens, the news is reporting a wave of sudden, inexplicable deaths, and some are just putting together that it resembles the "Ringu" phenomenon of 25 years earlier. A Tokyo news program runs a panel discussion, featuring Ayaka Ichijo (Fuka Koshiba), a grad student who has tested for Japan's highest IQ at 200+, playing the skeptic and Kenshin (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) arguing for musical explanations, and giving Ayaka a copy of the original tape of Sadako, which her kid sister Futaba (Yuki Yagi) digs out a VCR to watch. Elsewhere, a more social-media savvy young man, Oji Maeda (Kazuma Kawamura), is attempting to help someone who has seen the Sadako video survive, only to find it now kills in 24 hours rather than a week, and they all come together to try and figure out how to keep themselves, their loved ones, and maybe all of Japan alive, as a viral video can spread much quicker in the 2020s than the late 1990s.

Something in Ringu touched a chord in people the first time around, and one can see hints of it here, even if it also feel enough like the Ju-on movies (to the point of the haunting being described as a "grudge") that one wonders what was in the water back then. Unfortunately, so much of Sadako DX feels like the laziest take on half-decent ideas. It seems like there should be a solid foundation for picking the story back up at this time, with both bad information and an actual virus spreading as they are in the present day, but screenwriter Yuya Takahashi never gets much further than saying "this is like a virus, so maybe we should inoculate in the same way", which is an interesting idea but one the filmmakers can't commit to without random twists to sap it of its power. There's also some of It Follows in the film's depiction of Sadako which is apparently new, but it doesn't seem to add much, instead diluting a horror icon until she is practically not there.

All the characters are the most bland stereotypes of basic types, with Ayaka in some ways the most frustrating, because Fuka Koshiba seems like she's capable of more than this, but she's written and directed like Takahashi and director Hisashi Kimura have never actually met someone who is good at science or methodical in their problem solving and can't quite conceive of them as fully human rather than Mr. Spock. Kazuma Kawamura is a different set of self-aware ticks rather than a character, and it's hard to tell whether their anti-chemistry is a sort of choice - the filmmakers are playing this for much more comedy than is apparently typical of the series - or just two people who don't click on-screen. Hiroyuki Ikeuchi at least brings the sort of comfort veteran character actors tend to, but none of this group have interesting stories to plug Sadako into, and none are able to make the audience find them interesting without her.

Meanwhile, Sadako doesn't even look threatening, with the filmmakers going to the well of "this hallucination is just someone in an incongruous wig" so often that the monster becomes a joke. Beyond that, this is such a basic, direct-to-video-looking picture that it's all but impossible to imagine Hideo Nakata or Gore Verbinski ever touched this franchise. It's almost all shot in the most generic possible locations with seemingly no thought to how the lighting might give it some atmosphere. As a result, the scariest part of the movie is probably the original VHS footage (or Kimura's recreation thereof). It at least has some style 20 years later, and a hook the folks making this one can use, even if they've only got fragments of ideas for what to do beyond having teenagers ask what VHS is.

Not counting foreign remakes, this is the producers' second revival of the series (a "Sadako 3D" cycle came out in the mid-2010s), and it seems like the filmmakers make every mistake one can make in doing so: It's youth-oriented but connected to backstory from a film that came out 20+ years ago, too eager to make jokes to really commit to being scary, springing from ideas its makers seemingly don't have the vocabulary to express, and cheap-looking and amateurish on top of that. I suppose there could be Ring fans looking for another hit, no questions asked, but I'm not sure who else this is going to impress.

(Amusing credit note: Somewhere in the scroll at the end, either important enough that someone decided to subtitle it or written out in English to start, is someone who served as the "Supervisor on Series World View", and I've got no idea if this is somebody whose job is to wrangle the continuity of a 25-year-old series on its second wave of legacyquels or someone poring over the script to make sure that the dark comedy isn't too far out of line.)

Sagasu (Missing)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Shinzo Katayama's Missing has a couple of distinct directions it could go after it hits its first climax, and they represent an interesting choice in how a writer handles deepening the story at this point - lay out a longer path for the sleuth to follow, which makes the whole thing more prone to collapse, or build out to the sides in a way that makes for deeper complexity but less intriguing mystery. There's no right or wrong way to go about it, although those entirely drawn in by the film's genre hook may wish the filmmakers had kept things relatively simple.

It begins by introducing the audience to Kaede Harada (Aoi Ito), a middle-schooler who has had to become even more self-sufficient since her mother's death as father Santoshi (Jiro Sato) has fallen apart; she's just had to pull him out of the drunk tank (again). Santoshi thinks he's figured out a way to get back on track, though; he believes he has spotted the fugitive "No Name" (Hiroya Shimizu) who has recently fled Tokyo, and is ready to turn him in for the reward. Instead, he disappears, but rather than disappear into the foster care system, Kaede is determined to find him, enlisting a boy who has a crush on her to assist.

If this were the entirety of the film, it would potentially be a pretty compelling one; Katayama and actress Aoi Ito' avoid any girl detective tropes while still making a compelling case that a smart, motivated teenager might be able to hunt down a serial killer, or at least get this far in doing so. Katayama and Ito do such a good job of keeping Kaede's eyes on her goal while avoiding the language of mysteries that she never comes across as someone with a gift who might take on other "cases" someday as opposed to a kid recklessly following a path to her father despite other adults seeing just as useless as he often was. The filmmakers create great tension in part because they don't follow certain beats; rather than dangerous narrow escapes that might show she's onto something, there's ominous implied danger that indicates she may be in over her head.

That's mostly the first half or so of the movie, before the perspective shifts and the story backtracks to change points of view, and it becomes a very different film, with Kaede mostly reduced to a side character who is maybe even less present than would make sense given what events the film is showing. It is, on its own, a kind of intriguing story, one that starts from the premise of "No Name" being the worst sort of human monster that the viewer can imagine and then expanding outward to consider how seemingly decent people can, for various reasons, get caught up in a network of actions and motivations that include a man compelled to kill. Katayama has worked some in the Korean film industry, most notably with Bong Joon-Ho, and the kind of darkness he explores is the sort that seems to pop more in Korean crime films than ones from Japan, these universal undercurrents that are present all over rather than twisted codes of honor or plain-spoken villainy. Perhaps the most memorable moment in this section of the film is when No Name encounters a suicidal potential victim and cannot himself conceive of someone wanting what he has to offer; even to him, this situation makes no sense.

Katayama and his team tell the tale in a fashion that is relentlessly grim but not gleefully so; No noirish signifiers or sleek surfaces for evil to hide behind; everyone seems to be hovering around having just enough to get by but not the time or motivation to keep it nice, either surrounded by a mess or a sparseness that is not exactly neat. There is something either tragic or rotten about how Santoshi's ping-pong center has gone out of business but he and Kaede still seem to access the building freely, like the building's owners can't even be bothered to properly evict them or change the locks until they have to (maybe they're hoping he gets back on his feet, but it doesn't seem like that sort of movie). There's a sort of rot here that manifests itself in all the linked stories - people shouldn't want to die, and a serial killer who can operate effectively enough to elude the police shouldn't be someone a 15-year-old girl can track down.

The question, then, is how well the flashbacks integrate with Kaede's mission, and while the filmmakers do eventually manage to integrate them, tying the various time frames together and eventually fitting Kaede into this world in a way that quietly and impressively raises eyebrows, it maybe takes a bit too long to fit together as it circles back to the start and reveals how all this connects. The opening is so strong and clear in its purpose even as it establishes the atmosphere that the rest of the film will work in that I suspect even those who enjoy its flavor of moral quagmire may wish that either No Name or Santoshi or any of the people they encounter as their paths cross were as interesting and immediately compelling as Kaede.

Complexity and moral ambiguity are interesting and often worth the extra work they may require, but sometimes the clear, simple piece in the middle of all that can't help but stand out.

Fantasia 2022.07: Just Remembering, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, One and Four, Chun Tae-Il, and On the Line

Wednesday was a busy day but not one with a lot of guests, and also a relatively rare day where I stuck around De Sève into the evening, which is when Hong Jun-pyo made an appearance:

He was there to talk about his film Chun Tae-il: A Flame That Lives On (there are some other variations on the name, but that's what's on the schedule), an unusual project because you don't see many animated films, whether aimed at adults or younger viewers, about labor. Chun Tae-il was a seminal figure in such matters in South Korea, with Hong saying that the history of workers' rights in the country is basically seen as before him and after him. As you might expect, this isn't a corporate-funded feature, but something crowdfunded, as one can see from the extraordinarily long credits even if you don't read Korean, which must surely include everybody who made a 1-won donation.

The film itself was part of a special spotlight on Korean animation, and likely the only part I'll wind up seeing, as most of the others are short film packages playing a bit away from the core venues and sometimes in such a way that seeing them would take up two "slots". As animation programmer Rupert Bottenberg pointed out, there is a bunch of great work being done in shorts there, often as part of student projects, but once folks graduate, most animation houses there are doing work for Japanese and other foreign projects, with just the occasional home-grown feature being commissioned by studios. Occasionally one gets interesting enough to make it to the festival circuit - Beauty Water a couple years ago, for example - but it's fairly slim pickings.

Which is a shame. Chun Tae-il isn't necessarily a great movie so much as a noble one, but it's well-made enough to show there's talent there with visions beyond working for someone else.

Next up: Thursday and the start of week two, with All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, Detectives vs. Sleuths, Shin Ultraman, and Glorious.

Chotto omoidashita dake (Just Remembering)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

If you'd told me that Daigo Matsui and his cast had shot Just Remembering a bit at a time over the past six years and had to integrate covid when they got to the end (or beginning), if believe it; there's a genuine sense of time passing and things taking place at specific moments. That's not the case, apparently, it's "just" a story doled out in reverse order, one day at a time over seven years.

That day happens to be the birthday of Teruo Sako (Sosuke Ikematsu), who in 2021 works as a lighting technician at various stages around Seoul, on this particular night at the ballet. Elsewhere, taxi driver Yo Nobara (Sairi Ito) picks up a musician (Sekaikan Ozaki) who needs to make a pit stop mid-ride. Yo wanders into the theater and sees Teruo semi-awkwardly dancing on the stage after the show is over, and then it's 2020, when Teruo is working at a small rock club and Yo is on an awkward group date with friends after her shift. The guy she bumps into during a smoke break notes that her social-media avatar is a cat which she mentions is an artifact of her time living with her ex-boyfriend. It is, in fact, the same cat that Teruo feeds before going to work each day. And then it's 2019…

Clearly, the two used to be a couple, and the film will eventually get to the end, the good times, and how they meet. It's often all quite straightforward, with a deliberate lack of melodrama: Their relationship highs and lows believably ordinary, with no sense of destiny fulfilled or thwarted, even with major events tending to coincidentally happen on this day. This happens, and some other side story does or doesn't, but there's beauty and melancholy in it. In a way, Matsui's unconventional structure frees him from having to create an arc with conventional foreshadowing or tragic flaws. Things just happen, and there's not necessarily any grand lesson to be learned from it or code to crack, especially when viewed from outside.

Matsui and company have fun with that, though. There's an enjoyable playfulness with the recurring characters who often seem unstuck in time or something other than parallel. There's a man waiting for his wife to return outside Teruo's apartment, saying she's in the future; other characters will say they look familiar whether their encounters are in the past or the future. Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth looms large in Teruo's apartment - a poster, a frequently-watched DVD where the audience often sees him viewing the Winona Ryder segment, both an indication of how he's probably sort of hung up on Yo years later and a wink at how this film inverts its one-night-in-parallel structure.

There are also a couple really nice performances by the leads - I love the little rasp that strengthens in Sairi Ito's voice as the film goes back in time, something Yo smoothed out as she matured but never lost. There are a lot of signifiers of how Yo seems to gain confidence and maturity over the course of her twenties even though her circumstances seemingly don't change that much, from the cars she drives to standing a little straighter. Teruo has more obvious changes in his life but Sosuke Ikematsu keeps him something closer to level - amiable and appealing and also foolishly stubborn in spots.

There are movies that play this sort of structural game with grander ambitions, but this one does well for being what it is and of its time.

La Vaca Que Cantó Una Canción Hacia El Futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Movies like The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future can be either very easy or very difficult to love depending on the audience's general inclinations; their plan of attack involves going around the parts of the brain that reason, and some of us don't have minds that make that easy. This one's good enough to mostly work with a left-brained type like me, so I suspect it will hit even harder for those who think more symbolically.

It opens with a terrific sequence, music over nature leading the audience to a river, from which a barefoot woman in motorcycle leathers (Mia Maestro) emerges, unspeaking, and eventually heads into a local town, where a man collapses in shock seeing her through a window. That's Enrique (Alfredo Castro), and soon his daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) will be arriving with children "Tomas" (Enzo Ferrada) and Alma (Laura del Rio) to join brother Bernado (Marcial Tagle) to look after him as he recovers and help tend to the family dairy farm. The strange woman soon makes her way there, and longtime servant Felicia (María Velásquez) recognizes her as the mother Cecilia witnessed committing suicide decades ago, apparently no older or worse for the wear.

(Tomas is clearly transitioning socially, but if her chosen name is ever stated, I didn't catch it, so that's what I'll use here.)

Maybe there's some bit of Chilean folklore that makes this all seem, if not logical, then natural, but it's not stated, for better or worse. Personally, even when I wind up liking the pieces of something magic realist like this, I often find myself resenting the way it seems to substitute for story or agency. It can feel like a whole genre built on deus ex machina. Like, here, the opening return of the forty-years-gone Magdalena is so striking that it's hard not to be intrigued by just what's going on there, but she's seemingly literally just there to be a catalyst for her descendants rather than someone who has/had her own tumultuous life and issues. Those stories aren't bad at all, but that part of the movie is sort of spread out by the fantasy and the occasional annoying concessions made to it, like Felicia deciding Magdalena's family can't handle their return (even though Tomas and Alma already saw and recognized her) and doing a bit of awkward physical comedy to keep Cecilia from seeing her out a window.

It's a good group to watch, though - Leonor Varela doesn't exactly have a lot to do as Cecilia, really, but she inhabits this woman who is clearly quite capable in a high-stress job as a doctor and doesn't necessarily know how to fully relax and just let things happen around her family. Marcial Tagle sketches out a man who has been penned in by expectations of taking over the family business and not being able to be his own true self (the closet door appears to be open even if he can't step out, so to speak) without really having a full story to call his own. And Mia Maestro does nifty work presenting Magdalena as both some sort of nature-spawned entity and someone with a connection to these people, giving the impression that being simplified to a more primal existence allows her to more easily exist with them.

It's mesmerizing to look at and listen to, though. The unusual musical interludes are memorable and intriguing in the way that they seem to burrow into something about the land that exists outside humanity, or tries to. The apocalyptic-feeling collapse of the family business would be a great metaphor for the family as a whole, and still works well enough in the film. And, I've got to admit, the ability to make a character like "Cow 2222" somehow look disapproving and expressive is an impressive feat.

The Cow Who Sang… could hold together a little better for those of us who value such things, although I don't know how well it would retain its odd beauty if it did. Where it works, it dazzles.

One and Four

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There certainly seems to be a solid-enough premise for a mystery or noir here, but the filmmakers seem to run into a dead end because, while everyone talks about stripping a genre down to its essentials, there is a limit to how far that can go. Filmmaker Jingme Trinley spends a lot of time near that limit, maybe on the wrong side of it, and it can make even a tight-seeming film start to drag.

The premise is good - Tibetan forest ranger Sangyue (Jinpa) wakes up hungover; he's not supposed to have alcohol at his isolated lookout, but everyone breaks that rule, he's had some bad personal news, and he can go weeks without seeing other people. But today, a man (Wang Zheng) shows up at his door, injured, saying he's a forest cop who has been chasing poacher Ma Chunya. Something about this guy strikes him wrong, but Sangyue is aware he's not at his best, and everything seems to check out.

How to make the situation uncertain enough with just the two of them? It's going to take someone else showing up, but that doesn't happen for a while, and in the meantime, the movie kind of spins its wheels, having the two sit around the station drinking, trying to get potatoes warm enough to eat, and tending wounds, then taking some time in the woods to track down the poacher (or play at doing so) and check out the car crash (one car empty, one dead cop in the passenger seat of the other), but until Sangyue's neighbor/supplier Kunbo (Kunde) arrives, and even more importantly the driver of the other car, there's not a lot of detective work Sangyue can do.

Still, playing it out can be enjoyable in some ways. The environment is appropriately chilly, the forest where humans are out of place can feel enjoyably surreal, and the moments of action are well-staged. The basic set-up of a confused rural villager playing off the more sophisticated guy from further east who nevertheless does not speak Tibetan is a good pairing. Jinpa and Wang Zheng make a good contrast, but there's a lot more blunt yelling than potential mind games.

And on top of that, it's not exactly a satisfying ending, with Trinley resolving a few things but maybe a little too fond of the idea of uncertainty and ambiguity to ruin it by saying too much one way or the other. Which is the problem with stripping things down to essentials - an idea is general and open to everything, but an actual story must be specific, or at least more specific than this movie gets.

Chun Tae-il (aka Chun Tae-il: A Flame That Lives On)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis Korean Animation Spotlight, DCP)

The festival introduction stated that part of the idea of this animated film was to expose the story to an audience that includes kids, and I am therefore once again impressed with how hard Korean film will go given half a chance. Who else is gonna make sure their kids know their labor history like this, even among independents?

Chung Tae-Il (voice of Jang Dong-yoon) and his family came from the country but would migrate to the city to work in the clothing industry as that work dried up - mother first, then Tae-il, and eventually the rest, all still children aside from the parents. Tae-il started as a sewer's helper, then was a sewer himself, but at 19 opted to apprentice as a tailor, which was less guaranteed money but the chance at more, and perhaps a necessary step to the family opening its own shop. That being more of a management position put the inequities on the floor into sharp relief - long hours, illness from inhaling lint, and so much child labor - that when he found out that there were actual unenforced laws on the books to prevent this, he jeopardized his position by documenting offenses and attempting to submit a report to the police, only to find the government more interested in building Korean industry than protecting the people working in it.

Hong Jun-pyo's take on Chun's life is a fairly family-friendly version of the story, presenting information in easily-digested chunks with some repetition for it to be clear, but generally not patronizing. There are likely a number of factors left out - no mention of how South Korea's government at the time was more a military dictatorship than a democracy, for instance - and the other organizers likely have a bigger impact than is shown, as the labor movement would go on without Chun. Violence is probably softened a fair amount (especially the climax!), but it results in clarity more than overload.

The visual and animation styles are pleasantly clean - cel-styled people whose features have generally not been exaggerated or overly stylized, digital backgrounds that allow for camera movement that have enough processor cycles allocated for detail if not a lot of wear and irregularity. The style emphasizes the more timeless aspects of the story and characters rather than grounding them in the specific period with fashions or references (though older folks may get a laugh out of the young labor organizers along if anybody knows university students to ask for tips when organizing a demonstration).

It is, all told, an oddly likable story considering how dead serious the subject matter is, but that's how one introduces big ideas to new people.

Boiseu (On The Line aka Voice)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I (semi-ironically) use that old saw about when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail quite often, but On the Line does frequently feel like the embodiment of it: A movie about infiltrating the voice-phishjng scheme that ruined one's life for revenge seems like it calls for capers and con-artistry, but these the folks making it are action guys, so they're going to use that hammer.

As it opens, Han Seo-joon (Byun Yo-han) is an ex-cop who found there was more money in construction, and it's going well; he's expecting a promotion from foreman to project manager on the next job. But then, disaster strikes - not just a worker potentially falling to his death, but a coordinated communications blackout, barrage of calls to folks like Seo-joon's wife Mi-yeon (Won Jin-a), and fraudulent insurance policies has both workers and company losing everything. With just the name of a fake lawyer and the help of Kkang-chil (Lee Joo-young), a hacker he busted in his old job, he tracks things to a compound in China run by "Director Chan" (Park Myoung-joon) and Mr. Kwak (Kim Mu-yeol). The Korean police are already investigating the operation and tell Han to back off but that's obviously not happening.

You can see what the best version of this movie would be right away, with Han assembling a team and attacking the operation from every direction, only to find Chan seems to have outplanned him, or so it seems. It's an episode of Leverage (which had a South Korean edition), but it's a working formula, and there are enough off-kilter elements to make it interesting here: There's the entire cult-like call center, the writer with the brilliant scripts, the on-site operations.

Instead, the whole thing often comes off kind of clumsily. Han is such an obvious plant on top of being a blunt object quick to hesitate to ruin someone else's life that it seems impossible these meticulous planners would let him rise nearly as quickly as he does based on one reference, and there's really no reason to have both Kwak and Chan except to kill time by having them fight, while the guy writing their scripts is some sort of blackmail victim. There's no intrigue inside the call center worth keeping up with, and Han sneaking away or busting through back rooms never feels like a great undercover operation.

On the other hand, Byun Yo-han is at least a guy who brings a fair amount of charisma to this blue-collar-at-heart guy who is nevertheless smart enough to take on the schemers, coming across as a sort of Korean Gerard Butler. He can throw down in a fun bull-in-a-china-shop way but isn't invincible and lets out righteous fury without seeming to be a prick about it. It's a shame the filmmakers didn't figure out how to pair him with Lee Joo-young more; her hyper-capable techie who isn't nearly as smooth as she thinks she is works as a great complement and she's a natural in ridiculous, dangerous situations. Kim Mu-yeol has some fun chewing scenery - again, in a better movie you might do without Chan and just run with how Kwak sort of spins the same web for his crew that he does for his victims.

Ultimately, this maybe wants to be a little too straightforward, with an ending that feels like a cop show's introduction, making sure the audience feels the righteous fury of the scammed for the scammers. The thing is, the movie never really convinces that this is a problem that can be punched, even if punching is what it's got.

Short Stuff: The 2021 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

One of the odder effects of Disney moving all of their Pixar releases to their streaming service during the pandemic is that no short films have accompanied them into theaters, meaning that the "Best Animated Short Film" category lacks an obvious front-runner. Indeed, the category and theatrical presentation of it looks rather different than it has in previous years, with longer entries, a larger fraction of which are unambiguously geared toward adults. Where the theatrical package usually has to include some "highly commended" runners-up in order to reach a length where moviegoers feel the price of a ticket is worth it, this group passes the 90 minute mark without any help.

"Robin Robin"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Of course, there are still some familiar entries, though "Robin Robin", an Aardman-produced British half-hour Christmas special, now comes via Netflix rather than the BBC. It is, however, the sort of thing that should seem instantly comfortable - cute animals, earnest but dry humor, and a noteworthy voice or two sprinkled into the cast. It's a simple, fun story - when a robin's egg falls out of its nest and hatches after being found by a family of mice, the new sibling struggles to prove she belongs.

As with many of the best movies of this type, there's a dry sort of anarchy to what filmmakers Dan Ojari & Michael Please are up to as Robin (voice of Bronte Carmichael) cannot help but demonstrate that the whole "quiet as a mouse" thing does not come naturally to her at all, blithely leaving a mess behind her at every opportunity. She spends much of the film paired with a Magpie voiced by Richard E. Grant, all matter-of-fact about his obsession with shiny things, while Adeel Akhtar delivers not quite saintly patience as the mouse family's Dad and Gillian Anderson gets to be enjoyably sinister as a hungry stray cat. There are fun little songs and impressively staged chases. The animation is so impressive that it's hard to tell which sort of Aardman film it is - impeccable stop-motion with some digital assistance, or CGI with models built to resemble and move like plasticine. It is, from the jobs listed in the credits, the former, but is occasionally smooth in the way this medium often isn't to make one second-guess.

It's a charming little thing, thoroughly traditional right down to an earnest ending that lays out how Robin can be both bird and mouse and that this is only complicated if one makes it so. It's a fine before-bedtime story.

"Boxballet"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Anton Dyakov's "Boxballet" is the sort of animated short that in many ways seems to be built to see how far one can stretch its character designs and still have its characters recognizably part of the same human species. Its ballerina is sleek and thin, with her body seeming to twirl without it affecting her head at all; the boxer is lumpy and damaged, with an oxbow of a broken nose. They don't belong in the same space, obviously, except that each is a little too honest for their chosen metier. A chance encounter has him more open to something beautiful in his life and her maybe less self-destructive in her pursuit of perfection.

Dyakov tells this as visual anecdotes and without enough words to make subtitling necessary, and at times that seems not quite enough - there's not a whole lot of room for back-and-forth, and the ballerina gets lost in a sea of identically-designed figures in a way that the boxer really can't. It's a tricky thing to make them both represent something and become individuals, especially when there's an expressive deadpan slapstick to his matches while she can't quite escape choreography. They can't quite become actual characters together.

It probably also doesn't help that the coda doesn't quite hit the same way was it would have when the film was made a year or two ago - the fall of the Soviet Union and the promise of a new Russia where one doesn't have to fit the role others have chosen always had soem caveats, but requires a bit more grappling in March 2022.

"Affairs of the Art"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

I'm a bit curious how Joanna Quinn's "Affairs of the Art" plays when seen next to "Dreams and Desires: Family Ties", her previous short film from 2006 with which it apparently shares characters. Quinn dives right in without doing much to introduce the brash and enthusiastic Beryl, who has grown obsessed with creating art while also chronicling her sister Beverly's odd journey from creepy little anarchist kid to Beverly Hills taxidermy maven, but then, it's not like these are characters that need to be explained and set up: That Beryl just sort of barges in and spits a lot of weirdness out without context, filling in bits as they occur to her, is kind of who she is, and being methodical in her portrayal might not sit right.

It's the sort of film Mills and writer Les Mills make, too, where the morphing characters and the seemingly-raw pencils hint at a raw stream of consciousness that keeps Beryl from really talking about how, as you get older, the drive to create and appreciate art can take hold. It's rather meta in that way - an attempt to create clear expression out of chaos, where you're never quite sure what is sheer randomness and what has intent, especially when the randomness often is a part of what one is trying to communicate.

"Bestia" ("Beast")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

If nothing else, Hugo Covarrubias's "Bestia" has one of the more clever uses of its medium as a framing device, in that one of the first thing one notices about the design of its stop-motion main character is a crack in her oversized head, a zoom into which leads to the main flashback and whose later appearance serves as a climax. It's a neat trick, showing that how, especially in animation, how one tells a story is intimately related to the story itself.

That story, I suspect, has greater resonance in its native Chile, where one will connect what she is doing to the specific atrocities committed by the government in the 1970s, rather than just the idea of an autocracy building an atmosphere of distrust among its own people. The character designs are impressive - she's a frumpy little lump with the tiny face on her big head pinched into a permanent disapproving scowl, her hair an unmoving helmet, an obviously nasty piece of work who seems to elicit disdain more than fear. The thing is, she's accompanied by a big German Shepherd who is obviously intimidating and powerful but whose body language suggests a desire to please even when sitting obediently still. She's got affection for this dog but there are scenes where he's placed in a room with prisoners where you can't help but wonder what she's having it do. It's a quiet but cutting look at how evil twists things - he should be a nice but protective companion, she should be a brusque but concerned neighbor, and the government should be supporting its citizens rather than engaging in paranoid surveillance, but…

It's a simple but effective little tale. This sort of animation isn't the only way Covarrubias could tell it, but he's mingled the medium and the message very well.

"The Windshield Wiper"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Alberto Mielgo's "The Windshield Wiper" is ambitious and abstract, posing the broad question of "What Is Love" in its opening seconds and then intermingling a number of vignettes, all looking as if filmed as live action and then rotoscoped with digital tools, before returning to the man posing it.

It is, truth be told, sort of pretentious, and not necessarily in a good way where you can see the filmmakers aspiring toward something grand even if they never reach it. The very framing of a man in a café, smoking and asking a question sort of banal in its intended depth, is as likely to create a mood where one rolls one's eyes rather than finding oneself intrigued, and some of the scenarios - particularly the two tattooed young people in a supermarket who are an obvious match never looking up from their phones' hookup apps even when they are matched with each other - are easy targets. The painted-over style can sometimes be its own worst enemy, tying the film to realism but covering up the smaller human gestures Mielgo seems to be trying to elicit.

They make for great stills to be put on a poster or next to an article, though, and often impress as bold colors splashed across a screen. At best, they can emphasize how the viewer is an outsider looking in even if what they are watching looks familiar, perhaps most especially as a homeless man rages at the television screens in a shop's front window. That moment may have the least to do with the film's stated theme, but it's immediate and popped into sharp relief by the style in a way that the other moments strive for but seldom reach.

It's interesting that the people assembling this package found themselves going back and forth between words and pantomime, and how even the most whimsical shorts have something of an edge once one gets past the one obviously made for kids. I wouldn't bet against "Robin Robin" getting the statue - Aardman is awful good at what they do, and what they do is what many people see animation as being best suited - but I certainly wouldn't complain about "Bestia" getting it either, for being such a pointedly chilling story that makes the most of how animators can use every piece of the image to build toward what they want to say.

Short Stuff: The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

Of the three short film awards presented at the annual Oscars ceremony, the animation category is where most people are likely to feel some sort of routing interest because there's generally one entry that played before a feature, and this got seen, and thus made the viewer feel some sense of ownership. That one tends to win a lot, and often has a good argument, because it's got not just visibility, but the budget and technical resources of a major studio behind it, compared to the independent or student productions it's competing with.

There's one of those this year, "Sanjay's Super Team". What's unusual is that there might also be the perception of a race, as one of the other entries, "The World of Tomorrow", has had buzz attached to it ever since playing Sundance a year ago, getting a lot more articles written than the average short. There's also a new work from a director who is unfortunately best known for the project he didn't get the chance to complete (Richard Williams's "Prologue"), and two from outside the English-speaking world - Chile's "Bear Story" and "We Can't Live without Cosmos" from Russia.

Because animated films are generally much shorter than their live action counterparts the program of nominated shorts that is playing theaters (and will be available for download/streaming on 22 February) is generally padded out with a few other "highly commended" films from the nomination shortlist, and this year is no exception. What is a bit unusual is the arrangement; while those films generally come after the nominees, this year "Prologue" is given the last slot and there were advisories both at the box office and during the presentation itself that while the other films are suitable for young viewers, that one is not. Some in the audience snickered at this, only to find out that the people using the warning aren't kidding. It certainly allows the program to show the true breadth of what the medium can do, if nothing else.

Quick links:
"Sanjay's Super Team"
"The World of Tomorrow"
"Bear Story"
"We Can't Live Without Cosmos"
"Prologue"
"If I Was God"
"The Short Story of a Fox and a Mouse"
"The Loneliest Stoplight"
"Catch It!"

"Sanjay's Super Team"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, RealD DCP)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

As much as "Sanjay's Super Team" is a delightful little animated short - which it is - there seems to be something significant about it playing in thousands of theaters right before a major release on a holiday weekend as opposed to as part of an animation program at a film festival. If it's not quite something that doesn't feel the need to explain a specific culture to its mainstream American audience, it's awfully close.

It's also plenty entertaining use of that sort of context, telling a simple story of a boy watching a superhero cartoon on television while his father attempts to worship and meditate on the other side of the room, only to insist young Sanjay join him. It's a cute little second-generation culture clash, put together with plenty of charm and giving impressively subtle personalities to both father and son. It would be easy to exaggerate either, but instead they're quietly different enough that their not connecting is sort of sad. If that were all the movie was, it would still be impressive.

But it's got a big segment in the middle that's equally inspired by American superheroes and Hindu mythology, and it's a grand, colorful bit of action, genuinely surprising and kind of tense in how it plays out, in part because of how it reflects Sanjay's childish fears of upsetting his father or even doing real damage by extinguishing a candle, and in part for how it's impressively choreographed and put together, using the fact that the shrine is a box to create natural bounds for a 3D presentation (as it had when attached to Inside Out. The contrast with the real world is great, but the two halves of the short strengthen rather than distract from each other.

"World of Tomorrow"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston 2015: Shorts D, digital)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

It is downright exciting to see Don Hertzfeldt getting the sort of praise he is receiving for "World of Tomorrow", especially since it is not nearly as dry as some of the more obviously weighty films he had done in recent years - it is very funny, and not in the "if I don't laugh I'll cry" way of his trilogy about a man with a terminal illness ("Everything Will Be OK", "I Am So Proud of You", and "It's Such a Beautiful Day"). Or at least, not obviously in that way. I think what makes "World of Tomorrow" kind of amazing is that it combines everything Hertzfeldt has done - the anarchic comedy of his early shorts, the grand scale of "The Meaning of Life", and the heartbreak of the recent trilogy - in a way that cheats none of it. It's a view from high up that allows things to be both hilariously absurd and genuinely tragic.

The idea is impressively simple - a girl of about three is visited by a woman hailing from 227 years in the future who is either herself or her great-great-granddaughter, depending how you reckon giving birth to a clone body that will have one's own memories transferred into it, and takes a trip to the elder Emily's time. The details, though, are fantastic, the sort of weird science fiction extrapolations that won't make it into a live action or CGI film that costs tens of thousands of dollars for each second rendered, but which Hertzfeldt's trademark sketches and stick figures give him the latitude to pull off. Things are funny and amazing and sometimes horrifying, but never, ever, conventional.

And the contrast between the two Emilys is all of those things in spades. Little Emily is adorable and funny; we laugh and coo at how she isn't particularly impressed by what future-Emily considers important because she's a preschooler, while future-Emily blows right past "Twenty-third Century people sure are different" to having real psychological problems. It's innocently and edgily funny at the same time, and we can barely conceive that this carefree kid will grow up to be that mess of neuroses. And yet, Hertzfeldt carefully steers it away from "this must be changed"; as sad as she may be, and how her world is a horror-show of impending catastrophe and unfairness, the solution is not self-erasure or putting a terrible weight on a child, but instead trying to rediscover what it is like to be happy. That's brilliant, and it comes as part of a fifteen-minute bit of weird science fiction that is played out by stick figures.

"Historia de un oso" ("Bear Story")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

The music-box style of "Bear Story" is impressive and solid enough to trick the viewer into thinking it is stop-motion rather than created using digital tools, and that's an impressive bit of artifice on multiple levels. It makes the story subjective and human, even if it is being presented by anthropomorphic bear. He's skilled and intelligent, even if he is likely presented as an animal kidnapped by a circus in order to give the film a bit of metaphorical distance from the real-life "disappearings" that likely served as inspiration. And it gives the sort a sense of wonder, as the imitation of another art form sets unconscious limits in the viewer's mind, only to have director Gabriel Osorio Vargas and his oso defy them.

It's a harrowing tale he tells, with shadowy kidnappers, grand escapes, and a subsequent search for the family he lost. Bits are left for the audience to extrapolate - the pair of impressions on the matter bed, the lack of one in the son's room - and the music by Dënver evokes the simple melodies of the music box while still allowing the story to play bigger.

As much as "Bear Story" impresses on first blush, it grows with reflection; it feels as though Vargas has created something very personal that also comments upon how art works without being so inward-facing as to ignore the audience.

"Mi ne mozhem zhit bez kosmosa" ("We Can't Live without Cosmos")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

I don't know if there's a specific incident in the Soviet space program referenced in "We Cannot Live Without Cosmos", but like many of the nominees, it grows upon further thought. As one watches it, is easy to get caught up in the story and the gags - writer/director Konstantin Bronzit displays a gentle sense of humor in the early going, and the story that eventually emerges of two friends or brothers constantly trying to one-up each other in cosmonaut training, a clearly friendly rivalry. And then things go wrong.

Interestingly, Bronzit doesn't noticeably change his approach after that happens - the jokes certainly become darker, but there are funny bits all the way to the end, with great characterization despite the lack of dialogue and deceptively simple character designs. The style at least mimics cel-based animation, and it gives the film a great deadpan style.

I suspect that the arc of the story parallels the relationship many of us have had with the space program - an unconditional love that borders on obsession until a tragedy that, even if we're just fans, feels like such a betrayal as to create a complete loss of faith. Maybe we come to love it again later, but it's different, no longer so magical, more obviously populated by the grimly practical people than dreamers.

"Prologue"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

For someone who is revered by many as a pioneer, Richard Williams is best known for something which didn't come off (his animated feature The Thief in the Cobbler, in production for nearly thirty years, taken away from him when he could not hit a schedule). Given that this happened over twenty years ago, one can be forgiven for believing him retired; it's a bit of surprise to see him return with "Prologue", although one can also see how there has always been a disconnect between his talent and his ability to reach an audience.

The draftsmanship and smoothness of the animation is phenomenal, after all, starting out with the nifty effect of a drawing that is clearly two-dimensional and seemingly static - a flower, in this case - taking on life and seeming to pop out of the screen as a bee moves about inside it. From there if moves on to depict warriors in ancient Greece in a brutal, bloody battle witnessed by a small, terrified child. It's astonishing in its realization; Williams's fine pencil work is brilliant, but his fight choreography is engaging and for something clearly done in a two-dimensional medium, the camera seems to move as fluidly as it does in media designed to replicate three-dimensional space. It's virtuoso work from a master.

it's worth remembering that the distributor is not kidding with that parental advisory, there's nudity, blood and guts, and a coup de grace that will have even the less squeamish folks in the audience wondering if Williams really had to go that far. The battle also exists very much as a technical exercise rather than a story; it's maybe not fair to expect something named "Prologue" to give the audience more than that, but it does not exactly whet the appetite for a larger story.

"If I Was God"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

The first of the "Highly Commended" shorts is "If I Was God", a fairly entertaining flashback from animator Cordell Barker about his time in middle school, particularly a science class where his head was in the clouds about Lily while bratty Augie provided other distractions. It's a cute little story, something done by a lot of animators, but with more chaos than wistful sentimentality.

What makes it stand out is the impressive array of styles Barker uses. As much as the classroom scenes have a whimsical look to them, no two flights of fancy look the same. It's a visual feast, to be certain, and one that keeps the short interesting even if the nostalgic subject matter feels very familiar.

"The Short Story of a Fox and a Mouse"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"The Short Story of a Fox and a Mouse" is a fairly simple one as well, as a mouse evades a fox in a snowy landscape only to have two owls horn in, with the mammals becoming friends. This is not a fable, particularly, so much as a charming little chase that spans land, sea, and air.

It has a very nice design sense, though - furry animals are ambitious protagonists for what is a student film, and their rendering winds up not quite being the hyper-detailed work one would see in many commercial films, but something that gives the cute characters an additional solidity against the snowy backdrop. It's an awfully charming look that accentuates the playful nature of the film.

"The Loneliest Spotlight"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

It says something about "The Loneliest Stoplight", though I'm not sure what, that I immediately recognized it as having something like Bill Plympton's style but didn't necessarily think it was him, specifically. It's odd, because one usually knows a Plympton film on sight, and much of what makes his work familiar - the gridlocked crowds that vibrate with comic tension, the impossible stretching of characters and items, the occasionally dark but mostly silly humor - even with the changes that have come as he embraces digital tools more.

I think it's the use of Patton Oswalt giving voice to the title character, a traffic light on a country road that finds itself mostly idle when a freeway is built nearby, at least until a traffic jam has cars detoured its way. Plympton's cartoons and features often don't give their characters voices at all, much less one that engages the audience so directly. It's actually very charming, but it points away from the visual storytelling that has always been Plympton's strong suit. It's still a funny little short, if a little friendlier than the usual Plympton fare.

"Catch It!"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"Catch It!" is another animal-centered short from France, and while it's a little rougher than "A Fox and a Mouse", it's still quite a bit of fun. It's an unabashed cartoon, with a group of meerkats trying to keep a piece of fruit from a vulture. They've got numbers, but he can fly.

It's nifty and fast-paced, although there's something a bit off about the synchronized crowds of meerkats (although their oddness may be more feature than bug). The fast pace and clever staging counters any technical shortcomings.

(Some theaters appear to be including "Taking Flight", although it was not part of the presentation in Cambridge, MA.)

It's a strong, entertaining slate of nominees, and the other four included in the package are certainly good enough that they are not strictly there to pad out the running time. If nothing else, it's fun to check out if you've got a tight Oscar pool.