Fantasia 2020.01: Special Actors and The Columnist

Welcome (again) to the Fantasia International Film Festival, which opened both its on-demand program and livestreamed screenings up to Canada yesterday, and while I'm not in that lovely, less-scorching-hot-in-the-summer country whose leadership appears to have show some interest in containing the pandemic, I am apparently still considered press, so I can request and work my way through screeners, which is what I'm doing, mostly trying to reflect the actual schedule but also fitting in on-demand films that I didn't get to before I started. It's a bit strange that everyone is really going to have their own festival experience, even more so than usual.

Anyway, I'm grateful and will try to earn this pass by pumping out as many reviews as I can, even taking off work for it. I say every year that eventually they're going to realize that this is something a little bit more than a hobby and way less than a job for me and as such will realize that I can and would pay for tickets, but I'm glad it's not this year.

So, no photo of the banner outside Concordia this year, but there is the annual tradition of the opening night film not accepting press passes and me being fine with that because it will probably open elsewhere, which is why I've got pretty much nothing to say about The Reckoning and its cancelled Q&A. I would have liked to see it - Neil Marshall's The Descent was one of my favorite films at the first or second Fantasia I attended - but all the stuff around Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, and some executive at Universal is something I'm kind of glad I don't have to spend much time on, especially since it would have taken me a while to get past the "wait, he's not with Axelle Carolyn anymore?" stage.

Still, I would usually get into the second show of the night, which was effectively Special Actors, and a lot of fun. There might be a bit of concern when watching this that Shin'ichiro Ueda is a one-trick pony or repeating himself, and I do wonder sometimes if filmmakers (and film critics) start immersing themselves in film so early that they don't really know anything else. I don't really think that's the case here, but it's something to watch for the future.

I didn't really see The Columnist as part of the "first day", but they asked for negative reviews to be held until the festival began, so… I think it's kind of a mess in a lot of ways, but I also got kind of irked for it being "So Much for the Tolerant Left: The Movie". It's an attitude I hate coming and going, and while I don't really expect a slasher movie to advance a solution to how social media has made free speech an even more sharply double-edged sword than ever before and more easily weaponized by those who mean harm, I'd kind of like to see it grapple with the issue rather than just say "there are two sides!"

Once again, if you're in Canada, enjoy Fantasia! If you're elsewhere, take notes; there's other virtual festivals coming up and some of these are already in the pipeline to some sort of distribution.

Special Actors (Supesharu Akutâzu)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

There are two, or maybe three, pretty solid ideas for a movie in Shin'ichiro Ueda's Special Actors, and while I suspect that they could maybe be separated to better effect, Ueda would probably feel like that was making the same movie twice. It works as one, oftentimes pretty well, in fact, enough that the folks who watch and enjoy it will have different things that they wish there had been more of.

Things start with Kazuto Ohno (Kazuto Osawa), a security guard who dreams of being an actor but has trouble with both because confrontation and tension makes him pass out. Surprisingly, his younger brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono) has become an actor of sorts, and after a chance encounter, Hiroki recruits him for "Special Actors", an agency which places its clients not just in stage and screen, but real-life encounters - laughing in movies, fake dates, even muggers you can look tough for fighting off. A former scam artist (Yosuke Ueda) writes the scripts, and their latest major job is right up his alley: Schoolgirl Yumi (Miyu Ogawa) says that older sister Rina (Rina Tsugami) has fallen in with a cult and wants them to infiltrate and expose them.

As soon as that set-up starts being laid out, some viewers might find their eyebrows rising involuntarily, because a caper film that pits two crews doing basically the same thing against each other is just a deliciously fun idea, and both the Special Actors and the "Musubiru" cult are full of colorful characters. If this were just a caper flick, it would probably be in large part about the reformed swindler diving into taking down his opposite number but possibly being hindered by how his team is much less experienced at this sort of thing. There's bits of that there, but mostly the Special Actors seem to know what they're doing well enough to keep things moving quickly, and that's okay; Ueda is clearly having fun with the con-artist material, from the Scientology-mocking religion to the inevitable USB stick gag, and presents it as a nifty mission where folks imitating movies can still pull some nifty feats off.

Full review at eFilmCritic

De Kuthoer (The Columnist)

* * (out of four)
Seen 14 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)

You can see the strong idea that the rest of The Columnist was built around being put front-and-center during a climactic scene toward the end, and that's a thing people make movies like this should try to do. Put a nice cast around it and polish it up fairly nicely, and that should have the movie in good shape. And it is, much of the time, but in the moments when it's not, one gets the impression that the filmmakers haven't completely thought this through, leaving a movie that feels like they haven't thought their good idea through.

The columnist of the title is Femke Boot (Katja Herbers), who is working on her first novel to build off her fame as a regular newspaper columnist, while daughter Anna (Claire Porro) seeks to follow in her footsteps even as she's kicked off the school newspaper for a column the headmaster doesn't like. Like a lot of people, she has trouble dealing with social media, regularly swearing off Twitter and the like for the vitriol with which some respond to her work but logged back in the next morning. She spars on a panel show with horror writer Stephen Dood (Bram van der Kelen) but finds herself connecting when they meet under other circumstances. The tweets that get under her skin more than others come from a neighbor who is extraordinarily nasty online but different in person, to the point where something small can set her off.

It escalates quickly, and between them director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst don't necessarily seem to know where to go from there, or necessarily even how to get there. There's not a whole lot of room to examine how online pile-ons can make a person feel unsafe, or even genuinely in danger; on the other side, there's not enough twisted satisfaction in eliminating trolls. There's a bit implied in there about how murder seems to fuel Femke's ability to write her book, but only in a moment or two, and numerous instances that show that Femke is sort of a hypocrite where free speech and civility is concerned depending on whether it's directed at her or coming from her (or her daughter) just kind of sit there, like Windhorst and van Aart are content to have simply raised a point rather than having actually said much about it.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Fantasia 2019.10: Ride Your Wave, The Prey, Born of Woman '19, The Incredible Shrinking Wknd, and 8

Is there a place near Concordia that does a nice, simple omurice? It was all that the little girl in It Comes wanted and apparently the comfort food of choice for the couple in Ride Your Wave. A dish shows up twice in less than 48 hours at a film festival, that's a message, I guess.

Anyway, Ride Your Wave and The Prey were the early-afternoon shows in Hall, guest-free, leaving me some time to poke around the comic shops on Sainte Catherine to fill in holes to no avail. I'm beginning to suspect that Marvel just didn't print a few relatively recent issues. Plenty of time for a burrito before heading into DeSeve for the rest of the day.



First up there was the annual "Born of Woman" shorts block, which I missed the first couple of years because it always seems to get scheduled in such a way as to span two films on the other screen, one of which I want to see badly. This year, the stuff in Hall was stuff I could take or leave, meaning it was little issue getting into this 9-short block, with filmmakers Valerie Barnhart, Michelle Garza Cervera, Erica Scoggins, and Yfke Van Berckelaer on-hand.

It's a pretty great block of short films, where even the least exciting entry was pretty decent and the best were fantastic. It's worth noting that Ms. Barnhart (whom I think I've seen around the festival in previous years, perhaps as a volunteer) basically taught herself animation while making "Girl in the Hallway", grumbling later that she didn't realize that she'd chosen one of the most demanding forms of animation to work with. She seems to have mastered it, though, as several people are talking it up as not just their favorite short in the program, but one of their favorite shorts in the festival.



Later in the evening, I decided to switch from my planned selection of Killerman to 8, and I'm pretty glad I did; as much as I liked Cash Only a few years back. Harold Holscher made a pretty nifty little film that I'm glad I had a chance to see on the big screen. Holscher sounded like he was not necessarily optimistic about people in its native South Africa getting to do so. Distribution and exhibition are pretty hard there, and there isn't a lot of support for local genre film (something I remember hearing from a South African genre director at this festival something like ten years ago, claiming all the funding was for apartheid dramas).

Kind of a shame, since he made a great-looking movie, and it sounds like they had fun - the young lady playing the monster was a ballerina, and while they were initially worried about her freaking out the young co-star while in full make-up, they were apparently great friends by the end.

It's been a busy enough weekend that this post about Saturday is going up on Thursday, when I'll be at Shooting the Mafia, Lake Michigan Monster, Miss and Mrs. Cops, and the Zappin Party. Shadow is playing during my late-lunch-break, and well worth checking out on the big screen.

Kimi to, nami ni noretara (Ride Your Wave, aka Riding a Wave with You)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)

As Masaki Yuasa's output increases, he seems to be moving away from the strange and trippy films that gained him attention and toward the conventional, though if the result is something like this sweet animated romance, that's not a bad thing. It's still distinctive and occasionally eccentric, and winds up being something fairly unique once the bits of fantasy there are kick in.

Part of that's his character design; there's not much mistaking the jangly limbs, pointy noses, and skinny necks his characters have. There's also the sheer playful abandon in how, when the thing that does give this a certain amount of fantasy emerges, there's a whimsical acceptance, that what might mark a person as crazy can somehow happen, especially since it fits the personalities of everyone involved so well. Yuasa's movies have always had a bit of the fantastic amid the everyday, and here he slides into more carefully than usual, keeping it in Hinako's head until it absolutely must come out.

And then there's the delightful animation, where once again Yuasa is using water to craft a fluid reality while also filling the world the characters live in with nifty detail. It's maybe not always the ones people might consider important or universal, but things like a particular coffee shop, firefighting techniques, and smooth surfing pull the audience in even when they might look at the very simple story with side-eye. It's a very nice combination of down-to-Earth and fantastical that does a fantastic job of getting at just how powerful young love and be and how unreal the fallout is.

Full review on EFilmCritic

"Bar Fight"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: ACTION!, digital)

"Bar Fight" is the result of filmmaker Benjamin R. Moody finishing up a horror movie and deciding he wanted to hit something, and what he delivers here is a pretty darn good fight sequence with a minimum amount of filler around it. Some guys show up in the middle of a bar that's closing and find that the bartender is no pushover, and that's that.

With any luck, it will serve as a nice calling-card for star Aaron D. Alexander, who has enough screen presence to sell the tired, put-upon bartender before the action starts getting crazy and then surprises when the man is eminently capable of dealing with anything thrown at him. The film is five minutes long, but between them, Moody and Alexander imply the entire "guy has been through some things and doesn't think he's up to the challenge any more" story in body language and reaction shots, and the fight choreography doesn't entirely take precedence over showing who this guy is. He's reluctant and doubts himself all the way through the end, and even good action movies sometimes have trouble putting that amount of characterization into their action. The best use that action in part to reveal character, and it's great that the film found time for that without a lot of room to spare.

The Prey

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: ACTION!, DCP)

As "The Most Dangerous Game" riffs go, this certainly is one. You know the story, and the makers of this one don't have any particular twist or hook to add to it too make this stand out in a sea of them. Or at least, not an obvious one from this side of the Pacific; maybe it touches on something topical in Cambodia, but I'd be surprised, as it seems fairly generic.

The big disappointment is not so much that the story is familiar, but that the execution is kind of lackluster. This is the team that made the fairly impressive Jailbreak, but having a more open environment doesn't necessarily do a lot of good. There's some decent gunplay, but it's seldom as good as the previous film's martial arts and inventive camerawork, mostly just a lot of sharp running and tumbling and pointing guns with purpose. There are a few striking shots - filmmaker Jimmy Henderson knows exactly what he's doing when the characters burst out of the woods and into a beautiful, bright open space on a riverbank - but mostly it's just a decent example of Action Movie Plot #8.

Full review on EFilmCritic
"Lili"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

"Lili" is as clear and concise a story about how men use power positions to coerce women, and how even in situations like film where sexuality can be part of the job description, it is, at the bare minimum, a pretty crappy thing to do. Filmmaker Yfke Van Berckelaer lays it out step by step, showing how "strength" is often twisted as a route to intimidation. I don't know how many people seeing this will need the lesson, but it's an impressively clear one.

There's also no small amount of fun in watching Lisa Smit act as the title character. Some may feel that audition scenes, like the one that make up this movie, or other things where you can see the performers going about their business, ruin the magic, but it comes across here as somebody doing a thing well, and I've always enjoyed skill on display. Smit's good at her job, giving Lili a character even as Lili is donning other personae, and that's fun to watch.

"Sometimes, I Think About Dying"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

Stefanie Abel Horowitz does a nice job of digging right into self-doubt in "Sometimes, I Think About Dying"; I have no idea how much she and playwright Kevin Armento compressed his original work to get it down to 11 minutes, but it does fine work cutting down everything extraneous, never needing to offer an origin story or specific counter-arguments for how its narrator feels, just letting her show how navigating these feelings can seem almost impossible.

To do so, she chooses a lot of visually quiet locations where Fran can be overwhelmed by her thoughts, whether her house, a somewhat sparse office, or empty streets, or space outside the city. Katy Wright-Mead does a nifty job of making her seem more outwardly put-together than she feels most of the time without it conflicting with her narration, so that when one collides with the other, it feels a bit more wrenching, with Jim Sarbh making the guy who is genuinely interested in Fran maybe a little nervous on his own but not a matching-misfit sort.

"The Hitchhiker" (2018)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

Adele Vuko puts a couple of familiar short-film subjects together - 'hitchhiker leaving a corpse behind" meets "hiding something from concerned friends" - with a twist that unites them in maybe slightly-too-easy fashion in order to create a women-helping-women narrative. There should, it seems, be more of an explored downside to the deal offered, although there's not really room for it in a film this relatively short.

Vuko's put a nice cast together and given them plenty of room to play off each other, with Isaro Kayitesi especially fun as the group's worrywart, obsessively jumping immediately to Google to find whatever freaks her out, playing well off a group that are, for different reasons, more likely to let things go. It's a group that doesn't always seem to belong together but which makes you think they want to be, which is enough and important as things get more tense and the idea that things might not work out well becomes clearer.

"Wakey Wakey"

* * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

Mary Dauterman has made a nice-enough looking short, although I kind of got thrown by how I viewed it: My brain had the characters in a spaceship because the compositing which put an ocean outside their window made me think it was a screen rather than a look at what was right outside, and I'm still kind of not sure whether they were meant to be in a seaside house or on a boat, with the otherwise-unseen motion meant partly explain the twist ending. I kind of think there's a nifty sci-fi plot about dream machines or what have you possible, but there's also not enough there to presume it.

The result's certainly got intriguing potential, but plays like a short that just doesn't have enough to it to make a solid impression one way or another, and not having that definitive push toward a conclusion makes me less interested than having one and winding up as a bad idea.

"Vaspy"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

Hweiling Ow builds the sort of horror short hear that is originally weird and gross, but seemingly not about that much - or at least, not about that much in ways that particularly work for me. It offers an offbeat horror take on pregnancy stress and cravings being amplified by already having a five-year-old doing what he does, but it sort of feels like we've seen that connection before and the toy wasp making its heroine have somewhat more wasp-like tendencies which she dismisses doesn't quite seem special enough. It's an eccentric take on a classic, but one that's so eccentric that it doesn't quite hit so hard.

"Maggie May"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

It's kind of interesting that what are likely the two best shorts in this program both find their horror in not so much violence but inaction and dismissal. Filmmaker Mia Kate Russell offers up a villain that is fearsomely sociopathic in her idleness, and Lulu McClatchy is unnervingly great in the role: She has the sort of blankness that implies some sort of cognitive disability where she is genuinely paralyzed by not knowing what she should do, but also the sort of sneer that implies she knows just exactly what she's allowing to happen. She's thoroughly awful, but Russell and McClatchy invite you to feel bad about hating her.

Meanwhile, Katrina Mathers is making her sister a little more than generically nice; Russell gives her a bit of personal dissatisfaction to work with, and once she finds herself injured by a freak accident, she does a fantastic job of channelling the viewers' horror and confusion without telling them what to feel. Russell keeps certain dangers off the screen in a way that allows her to strike at the heart of someone's worst fears without feeling exploitative. It's the sort of horror that leaves a nice, hard lump in one's stomach even before you start wondering how much it applies to broader situations.

"The Boogeywoman"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

Would I probably get more out of "The Boogeywoman" if I had, at some point, been a teenage girl? Almost certainly. Even without being able to personally identify with what Sam (Amélie Hoeferle) is going through as she gets her first period well after her friends at an inopportune time, I loved watching the way these kids played off each other, for good and ill, as well as how things like a power failure at the roller rink and empty small-town streets are nervous-making without being overbearingly so.

When it gets the the supernatural part, it kind of loses me; I kind of feel like I should be making some greater connection between all the talk of Sam never knowing her mother and what else is going on, but it's never quite there for me, although it's acted and presented well enough that I can see that something is going on. Which may just mean that this short is made with other people in mind who will see how it fits together, which is fine. There's certainly enough there for me to give whatever I couldn't catch the benefit of the doubt.

"The Original"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

"The Original" is the rare short film where the finale is a kind of perfect knife to the gut, where I both want to see the fallout of it while also appreciating that the stabbing pain of it is undiluted. It's a nifty concept explored just enough to be a big emotional mess but not fall apart through being over-detailed.

Director Michelle Garza does a lot of nifty things to make writer Andrew Fleming's script seem more personal than topical, mostly by not setting it in something that clearly feels like the near future, but rather by shooting in black-and-white and creating a world that seems half British and half Mexican, making it hard to "yeah, but…" at any point. There's also an impressive division of labor between the actresses - Ariana Lebrón gets what at some points seems like most of the heavy lifting, as her character visibly grapples with all the hard decisions and loops the hospital makes her jump through to get her girlfriend's consciousness transferred into a healthy clone body, but Rebecca Layoo is doing amazing work in the background, so unsettlingly convincing as the victim of what appears to be a stroke that seeing the new her well feel genuinely mind-boggling.

There's a catch, though, and it's a delicious one, and I'm still pondering how it seemingly must have played out days later. You could make a feature out of this story, but it's still pretty great at 13 minutes.

"The Girl in the Hallway"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)

I'm not sure whether director Valerie Barnhart animated directly to a spoken-word performance by Jamie DeWolf here, or whether she had him record a new version for this film, but that's just nitpicking in how the great work she did was split between direction, animation, and editing. The full result is immensely impressive for a first-time filmmaker.

She's got a fine base to build on - DeWolf's story of how he can't read "Red Riding Hood" to his daughter because it's associated with something awful in his mind is exceptionally well-told without ornamentation; he's a raconteur who builds up and spaces out without it seeming obvious while also making it clear that he has to do it this way, because confronting these memories is hard. It's a lurid-sounding bit of true-crime, shot through with how hard many work to avoid confronting this sort of thing, and you can feel both the guilt and not having done more and the need for self-preservation that prevents it.

Barnhart layers impressive animation on top of it, and the result is something that is very conspicuously not beautiful - even the sweet-seeming missing girl who deserved better is not fully idealized - but is full of the little details that help put those who have lived a comfortable life into a scary situation and transitions which keep the story moving even as it stretches out in time. Barnhart enhances mood and storytelling without ever straying from or undercutting DeWolf's base.

El increíble finde menguante (The Incredible Shrinking Wknd)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The big question after this screening was "when did you see it", referring to the aspect ratio changes going on through the film, which maybe speaks to how it's more of a visual gimmick than something that got across what the movie was going for. Which is a shame, because as flawed as it was, it plays into how the film is about someone not doing much with her youth, only to suddenly get hit with the idea that there's less she can do and less time to do it than she thought.

It's a strong idea but one that didn't necessarily get translated into events that well; unlike most time-loop movies, this one never has a period where Alba is trying to figure out what's happening or do something about it before getting to acceptance. In a way, that's just her character, but it leaves a chunk of time in the middle when the film seems to be running out the clock as surely as she is, and while there must be some waste to realize that time is precious, it's not the audience's time that should be wasted. Director Jon Mikel Caballero really doesn't seem to have a great idea of how to fill the time before the resets get tighter (the loop tightens by an hour every time through), and that's a frustrating issue at times.

It's still put together well, and there's some really nice work by cinematographer Tânia da Fonseca. It's a great-looking movie all around, especially with the camera often pointed at pretty locations, but the way she had to reframe for different shapes throughout seems deceptively tricky, and her knack for shooting with depth comes in handy as the screen becomes a window the audience is peering through. There may be tricks here, but everybody rises to the challenge to make an impressive film.

Full review on EFilmCritic

8

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The "demon" at the center of 8 is a sad, guilty one, something which makes for a different sort of thriller than the fairly traditional opening implies; it's as much the story of someone bound to something supernatural as those facing it, even if it has the look of something a bit more conventional.

Small things give it a distinct, South African identity; the very time it takes place, in 1977, seems too late for this kind of story, like the rest of the world is more settled, but here these sort of old family mansions are just starting to become obsolete. It makes "Lazarus" feel even more like a lingering remnant of something else, which the white family doesn't understand but the locals do, enhanced by Tsamano Sebe's fine performance, which seems a bit out of time itself. There is lingering mistrust that needs little explanation but forms a real barrier.

The film doesn't coast on its particular setting, though. It's a great little scary story, with dangerous gentility serving a more plainly monstrous entity from the start. The tension is built on nervous hope that some sort of basic decency will counter the need for a fight that many of the characters don't seem like they can win. It's shot on great-looking locations, with a striking change of scenery and style at the end, and plenty of chances to enjoy the way of the more traditional ghost story bits play out in handsome style.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Fantasia 2018.18: Penguin Highway, International Science Fiction Shorts, Circo Animato, One Cut of the Dead, and Five Fingers for Marseilles

I am not sure whether having two shorts programs on the same day is sensible or crazy, but it probably means that this particular post will wind up very late, though only this post.

Plenty of filmmakers, though!



So, for the International Sci-Fi shorts, we have "Spin" director Leticia Belliccini, "Be My Guest" director David Jermyn, "Greater Good" director Andrea Ashton, "One Day the Sun Turned Black" director Joe Lueben, and "They Wait For Us" directors George Thomson & Lukas Schrank.

It was a pretty good group of shorts, with Belliccini noting that they didn't have a location until relatively late in the process, because permitting didn't come through at the other places, and it didn't become a one-shot movie (or at least cannily edited to look like one-shot) until that location was chosen. It's a pretty impressive result, as was what Ashton achieved with her short, initially part of a 72-hour-film project, which is usually good fun and good practice but doesn't necessarily produce something worth a festival entry. Some folks had nit-picky questions, but, guys, 72 hours is not a lot of time to smooth everything out, and in the case of some of the particular questions asked, sometimes people don't act perfectly in real time, and it's okay if a movie captures that.

Also: "One Day the Sun Turned Black" was something Joe Lueben came up with inspired by something in a paper by one of the kids he teaches (though the kid doesn't seem to be credited), and let me just say that though I think it's based on a neat idea and a pretty good movie, folks in the audience had opinions on the white guy making a movie about white people who have to change their skin color to survive in a world where the sun has changed. As they should! It's an intriguing what-if that goes some questionable if unintended places when you look at it closely. I don't know if it works at another scale, but it's an idea that kind of fascinates me.

(Another one where people were nitpicking afterward, about how a less-bright sun probably wouldn't necessitate more melanin or how one character didn't have white-person hair, and, folks, please remind me to not be that guy, especially when the movie is 14 minutes long! At that scale, it is okay to leave a lot of explanation out, because there's just not time and those details, fun as they may be when you get them right, just aren't important.)



For the animated shorts, fewer movies were represented but often more of the team. Here we have "Building 108: Barnacle Bill the Tailor" animator Raph Bard and director Rick Trembles (though that is but a small sample of the jobs each did); "Albatross Soup" illustrator Fiona Smyth, composer Daniel Rosato, and Director Winnie Chung; and "Space Between the Stars" director Samuel Bradley. An interesting group, with a fair number of questions for Bradley because the company which produced the short (and for which he works), Guru Studio, is apparently kind of a big deal in animation, working on a number of series, but not necessarily doing these one-off things so much, although Bradley found it incredibly gratifying.

Winnie Chung came at "Albatross Soup" from a different angle; she mostly works in live-action and documentary, came across the albatross soup riddle from some friends, and thought the process of working it out would be nifty to visualize. She said she probably could have just gone from there, but wound up bringing in other groups so that the audience would hear different accents and ethnicities, a sort of audio contrast to how Smyth went with different visual styles. Smyth, from what I gather, doesn't do a whole lot of animation work herself, so that made for an interesting, unique short.

Then there was Trembles, who can seem to land in that weird spot where you're not sure whether he is trying really hard to be iconoclastic or if he's the genuine article. It doesn't really matter. Having Raph Bard around to kind of puncture that a bit ("are you going to explain my process when I'm standing right here?") made that team's questions go down easier, and it was an interesting talk about how their styles contrasted and made the short better - he's very Fleischer-like with lots of short motion loops while she tends to go for something bigger and smoother.

After that, it was across the street for One Cut of the Dead and Five Fingers for Marseilles, which was pretty good, although I get the feeling that the audience for that 9:30pm movie on the third Sunday of the festival is roughly 50% tired but committed people and 50% folks with a serious interest in (South) African cinema. It's pretty good, but I was pretty worn out.

Next up…. Okay, let's not pretend that I posted this and some chunk of 30 reviews the next day. It's taken some time.

Penguin Highway (Pengin haiwei)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)

For a movie about penguins just showing out of nowhere in a precocious kid's hometown, and that being the tip of the iceberg as far as weirdness gets, Penguin Highway is kind of dry. There's an angle from which that's kind of nifty - the film and its hero don't just love science as a reference book that contains interesting facts, but as a rigorous process that allows them to expand their knowledge - but that does cut down on the goofy antics, and the strangeness gets kind of straight-faced at times. It's got a bunch of fun scenes when things do get silly, but its whimsy and focus do sometimes work at cross purposes.

Aoyama (voice of Kana Kita) is a very focused fourth-grader, whether one is talking about his studies, his attempts to beat his classmate Hamamoto at chess, retaliating at the guys who bullied his friend Uchida without throwing a punch, pursuing his intense crush on the busty receptionist at the dentist's office (voice of Yu Aoi), or investigating just where the heck all the penguins who show up out of nowhere are coming from and going. What he doesn't initially realize is that there's another scientific mystery, just outside of town, that may dwarf a bunch of random penguins.

Most kids' movies position the kid like Aoyama as a side character - even when the main character is a meant to be sort of a nerd, this guy is so eccentric that he makes the other guy more relatable for a large audience. He is, at times, humorous and frustrating in equal measures and often for the same reasons: The very serious, self-important knowledge of just how smart he is can make a viewer nod every time someone seems exasperated with the little brat, but is also fantastic raw material for voice actress Kana Kita to make deadpan magic (aided by animators giving him a small mouth inside a big, round kid's face for those lines). He's definitely a weird kid that takes some effort on the part of the audience, but the filmmakers make his quirks add up to something rather than making them things that must be chipped away.

Full review at EFC.

"Be My Guest"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

It's natural to snicker a bit at sci-fi shorts like "Be My Guest" which build an ambitious story around a prop that looks to be made out of junk found in the director's garage, but a lot can be forgiven if it actually uses that as a jumping-off point for something interesting, which writer/director David Jermyn manages here. It's kind of basic, telling the story of a guy (Zachary Bennett) who rents the use of his body out to someone online almost entirely from his perspective, so the audience experiences time jumps rather than tha actor sort of playing a dual role, and its early talk of "hibernation" at times makes it feel like the filmmakers hae their sci-fi concepts confused.

It winds up working well enough, though, because the audience can see the relevance to real-world concerns easy enough - a husband who is literally not present, a gig economy that offers people a bit of money but no actual experience, being destroyed by envy that one has helped create. Jermyn occasionally just lays the metaphor right out there, but clarity is often better than ambiguity when you actually have something to say.

"Exit Strategy"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

As with the short that preceded it, "Exit Strategy" lays what it was going for down without a lot of embellishment when it gets to the finish, but it's interesting how it gets there, and likely fairly rewatchable as the audience discovers what is actually going on. Which isn't hard; if you're seeing it in a science fiction block, it telegraphs where it's going pretty hard, and even if you're not, you can probably guess. Still, writer/director Travis Bible plays just exactly which fantasy cardy he's playing fairly close to the vest, enough to keep a viewer guessing about where it's leading for a while.

I suspect that a second time through will make one really appreciate the work done by Christopher O'Shea as Shane, the brusque genius brother. It's a performance that initially just looks like a socially-stunted nerd but more clearly becomes a man carrying a weight as it goes on, but with a little hint of not exactly being unhappy to spend time with Matt. Richard Kohnke turns in a nice, simply sincere performance as that brother. His job is to basically be a good guy and mean what he says, which is earnest when the audience might be braced for another twist. It lets the movie back off a bit in its last scene, giving it a low-key but emotionally satisfying ending.

"Spin"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

Director Léticia Belliccini said in a Q&A that the location they found would determine the shape of this short, and it's hard to imagine it in a place where she didn't have just enough room to play while still making her characters feel boxed in. Two or three minutes in, you realize you haven't seen a cut yet, and as she keeps her camera a few steps behind Mallard (Johan Libéreau) as he races about the apartment building and courtyard in a panic after witnessing his wife (Armelle Gerbault) being attacked, it becomes a nifty trick. He seems unstuck in time, chasing a doppelganger and visiting happier times but being shadowed by his own guilt.

Story-wise, it's the sort of thing one might have to watch two or three times in a row to really absorb all of what's going on, but it's the sort of propulsive movie where you can enjoy getting about 75% there because seeing it come vaguely into shape is enjoyably tantalizing, not slowed down much by dialogue, as Belliccini mostly advances the story through action and movement. There's the occasional quick change without a hidden cut, the feeling of pieces coming together, and it's a strong enough mood with everything else working together so well that even those who prefer a more thoroughly explained narrative should enjoy it.

"One Day the Sun Turned Black"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

The neat idea behind "One Day the Sun Turned Black" could probably become an impassable minefield if not handled carefully, but the thing is, a big part of the appeal is that it's got a land mine or two buried in it, placed kind of indiscriminately, just waiting to explode in a hail of well-intentioned but misdirected commentary on race and appropriation. It's a fertile enough universe that it might be interesting to see it as an anthology, put together by a more diverse group of filmmakers than the white man who made this one.

Joe Lueben and his collaborators tell a good story, though, first positing that something happened with the sun, not only causing it to appear black in the sky but showering the Earth with some sort of radiation that does a number on fair skin. So dark-skinned Harmony (Shavonna Banks) can jog around the park but her very Caucasian father (Daniel Martin Berkey) can't, leading to him living the life of a shut-in, his already aggrieved mental state exacerbated by the talk radio he listens to. It's not a story that has a lot of events, or dramatic speeches, but it works in large part because most people will get the generational conflict there - young people embracing a world that is less white-by-default while their elders are torn between retreat and defiance.

The devil is in the details, and my favorite one comes when Harmony buys a bottle of "pigment" at the corner store - it's not just that what's going on starts to fully snap into place, but that the African-American woman ringing her up packs a lot of context into just a couple of looks and lines, telling us that, yes, there is a lot more to this situation than things being uncomfortable for a woman and her prejudiced father. Lueben strikes a nice balance between the personal story and the larger world, making sure that the audience sees that these two sides don't exist in isolation. It's good enough and rich enough to make one curious about more stories within that world even if one also worries that it's the sort of scenario that stokes white paranoia.

"Expire" ("Exhale")

N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

It's been a month, my notes stink, I'm basically giving this a pass. It looked gorgeous, a quality vision of a post-apocalyptic world where breathable air must be zealously conserved, but pretty much no story that stuck.

"Greater Good"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

Products of 48-hour film challenges don't often actually make festival programs; they're more about having fun and maybe just convincing people that making a movie is an actual thing that they can do rather than something that requires trained professionals and huge budgets. Sometimes, though, you get something like "Greater Good", which has a simple but solid idea, just the right resources to tell the story, and no time to second-guess all the details.

It is, after all, very easy to second-guess this one. The plot involves pregnant Madeline Knight (Miranda Plant) surprised by the arrival of Dr. Alexis Livingston (Annelies Lee-Reid) of the Department of Alternate Timelines along with a woman said to be her future daughter (Lauren Kneteman), who has committed an atrocity in 2041; Livingston offers Madeline a syringe that will safely, painlessly induce miscarriage. The three actresses all play their roles well, and the filmmakers keep the focus squarely on the classic moral dilemma of what one should do with that sort of foreknowledge. It's sad but not manipulatively so - it doesn't celebrate the doing of bad things for good reasons to excess - and finishes quickly without ever having strayed far off course.

Which is where it could have become a mess; it's exceptionally easy to look at this story and say "but how does she know Livingston's on the level" or "as far as the people in the future know, this Department has never actually changed anyone's mind" or want to dig into just what Isabelle's crimes were and if time travel might just be the ultimate tyranny, preserving not justice but the status quo. These are good questions, but for the purposes of this story, not actually important, and I suspect that making the movie fast kept the filmmakers from undermining themselves trying to answer them. There is just no time, so you focus on what can be controlled, and that works out pretty well in this case (plus or minus a plinky, maudlin score).

"El aleteo del colibrí" ("The Flapping of the Hummingbird")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

This short is a stylish enough bit of work, but one that falls into the category of films that feel like they have weighty concerns (the festival description talks about fate and free will, while the opening points out that of the 60 thousand thoughts humans have per day, 90% are about imagining the futre) but which in practical terms, aren't really saying anything important. This one follows Fran (Adrià Collado), a middle-aged man not really satisfied working at a gas station/convenience store, who is having a spat with his wife Sara (Melena Miquel) and thus doesn't let her call distract him from a shoplifter (Igor Szpakowski). Writer/director Mertxell A. Valls rewinds, goes into bullet-time, takes different perspectives and plays with how small changes could alter the action. It's the sort of thing that seems profound, but maybe actually isn't.

It's still put together in terrific fashion, though - writer/director Mertxell A. Valls is good at focusing the audience's attention on small but important things, highlighting the way that small choices seem like they can have much riding on them, pointing out pathways that could cause things to go differently, accepting complexity but not overwhelming the audience. The small cast is generally excellent, as well - Collado gets the most room to create his character, but all of them create characters that fit their purpose perfectly, but also seem like they have a life beyond the film, that they've arrived at the start of the film through a messy process, and as a result are easy to root for. Not so much to win, but to stumble through, which is all most of us can hope for.

"They Wait for Us"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

Another one I'm going to pass on I'm afraid; it's just not registering a month later.

"The Origin of Sound"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

You can fall down a rabbit hole considering "The Origin of Sound" as part of a festival shorts block; it's got smaller animations of different styles within it, making the whole thing a kind of fractal experience (now, imagine if you're at a festival that shows multiple animation blocks in a day…). That's not quite the most interesting thing about it, but it's fun to think about.

It also makes the short kind of inside-baseball, in a way, God creating sound as a metaphor for animators adding sound to their creations, though it's a fun one. The creation he's adding it to is something of a cliche - an amusingly resigned husband and his perpetually annoyed wife - but it's played out in visually distinctive fashion with live actors being manipulated like stop-motion puppets or at least giving the impression of such. It's neat to look at, although maybe a bit too drab after a while, compared to the bright and varied cartoons the sound man is taking his rude noises from.

It goes on a while and eventually this gag gets a little worn, especially since a lot of these cartoons are either little but (or reduced to) basic gross-out gags. It feels like directors Paul Driessen & Toon Loenders are taking the long way around to get to a single pratfall, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - what better ending is there for a cartoon, really?

"Island of the Deceased"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

A kind of impressively gross bit of animation which starts with a man plucking the eye from a mummified corpse to place into a taxidermied girl and continues from there to feature a whole bunch of cadaver art and surreal, spooky imagery. It's impressive and atmospheric - director Kim Ji-hyeon has a fine eye for macabre design and uses churning backgrounds to make the island setting feel even tighter, like there's some sort of force field around it. The story is thin - of course these grounds are cursed and the people who trespass will be consumed - but presented well enough that it's okay.

I must admit, I often feel like shorts like this are just on the border of something - very impressive for those who already find the macabre enticing but not quite able to convince those who don't already love that sort of thing of its twisted beauty. It's impressive, and others will like it more than me, just not transcendent enough to cross the gap.

"I Don't Like the Comics You Drew"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

Maybe you need a little context for this one. Lei Lei's animations are often filled with fine detail, color, and a scrolling two-dimensional world that seems overwhelming while still being somewhat abstracted and whimsical. This has a lot of the same style, but the drawings are simplified, more monochrome, with thick black lines, and attention much more focused on the foreground than the environment. It feels like a guy who, having generally been nice and encouraging to all the people seeking his approval, has finally snapped.

It's a style that pairs nicely with the music by Shanghai Restoration Project (who did the soundtrack for Have a Nice Day, last year's memorable Chinese animated noir), a diss track that is catchy and funny while getting some genuine frustration to come through. It's a project that integrates both halves well, not feeling like music slapped onto a cartoon or like a music video, but an excellent collaboration all around.

"Crazy Cat"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

I liked this one a lot. I'm not much of a gamer, and even though the pixel-art style of this one harkens back to when I actually really did play video games, that's not an automatic plus. There's a lot to like about its particular cute designs (which can handle a little violence being done to them) and synth-y soundtrack; they don't necessarily reference something especially specific to my eyes and ears, and director Seo Ji-hyeong's world of anthropomorphised animals seems fun and eccentric on its own.

I like the way it does a bit more than just tell a story without words, too - you get that the cat of the title has some pretty severe anxiety issues, probably related to her bunny nemesis, and copes with it by imagining her life as an RPG or dungeon crawl and everyday challenges she has to face as boss battles. Seo does a nice job of differentiating the pixel art so that there's a clear distinction between an actual game, the real world, and how the character copes. There's enough in common to keep transitions from beig jarring, even though there's some delightful absurdity in someone being a jerk on the subway becoming a fight to the death.

It's funny and cute, but also good communication, which always impresses.

"Building 108: Barnacle Bill the Tailor"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

This isn't quite a pilot for a series, technically - I believe director Rick Trembles did an even shorter take on his monster-inspired characters to get this one made - but it feels like one, spending its ten minutes to both introduce the characters and their world and also give them an adventure, and it feels kind of insufficient on both counts: Drac, Cobweb, Ghost, and Braindead are all more concepts than friends and neighbors, while the whole thing with the barnacles never quite feels like either a story or a joke about how crazy apocalyptic stuff intersects with these guys' lives and they just shrug it off. Double the running time to broadcast-series length or get a couple more episodes under the belt, and maybe it comes into focus.

It's kind of fun, though - the characters do pop as individuals despite being obviously inspired by classic monster imagery, and Trembles does a fair job of indulging his campier impulses without having them become the entire short. He's very much a fan of the spookier Fleischer toons, referencing their obvious animation cycles and happily increasing the gore, but he's wise enough to let co-director Raph Bard break those cycles when something more free-flowing is needed.

I don't know if more "Building 108" would get things working or wear out the joke, but I'd kind of like to see him get the chance to find out, if that's his intention.

"The Voice Over"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

The gag behind "The Voice Over" isn't a new one - there have been a number of short films where the narrator was revealed to be a voice in the protagonist's head - but its filmmakers do a fine job of sneaking up on that, playing the kind of cutesy cartoon gag where "going crazy" is just aggravation before jumping right to antipsychotic drugs, and that feels downright ruthless. It shifts the feel of the film, which was kind of cute but nervy, into something with a genuine edge.

"One Small Step"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

"One Small Step" is such a beautifully designed dialogue-free short, built to efficiently grab at the audience's heartstrings and pull, that someone watching it without logos would almost certainly presume that it's this year's Pixar short film. That's not what every filmmaker aspires to, but when you hit that goal as well as this one does, you're doing something right.

Admittedly, this hits a lot of my sweet spots, with a kid who absolutely adores space; an immigrant dad working hard to support her dreams, both making her adorable moon boots as a kid and to send her to college; bright, colorful visuals that emphasize the excitement of the goal; and bright, sharp design that can feel a bit mocking when she is falling short. The falling short isn't necessarily a sweet spot in and of itself, but it's the unexpected thing that makes the story work - there's a moment when it genuinely feels like this may become a movie about learning to still love something after it's clear you won't be part of it in the way you'd dreamed.

And it may be that story, eventually; it ends with hope but no guarantees. Still, it's a charmer, and a delightfully sweet moment in the middle of an often-bloody program.

"Lovely Girl"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

I remember this vaguely from my notes ("Girl accepting flowers puts guy in trippy happy place… then not"), and that I kind of liked it, especially with the Chubby Checker song in the background - it communicated in the moment, the heady experience of being loved and then having doubts.

"Albatross Soup"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

A pretty good "animate-to-voices" piece, although I wonder how it would play if you've heard the "Albatross Soup" riddle before. Do the various voices trying to puzzle it out become frustrating, or does the impressive, varied art still impress. Truth be told, I kind of didn't like the riddle itself, finding myself reacting "wait, what?" to each step toward solving it. It's a mean one.

Not liking the riddle itself, though, doesn't mean you can't enjoy the sound of people solving it. That variety of voices clearly enjoying the mental exercise is the strong base that the filmmakers start from, and artist Fiona Smyth gives director Winnie Chung creative, constantly-shifting imagery to illustrate it. It's a fine example of a film depicting not so much what is happening but a thought process, with what's shown having a properly ephermeral, not-solid feel.

"Simbiosis Carnal"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

Images stick, but not the whole. There were, I recall, some very nice bits of design where the male and female figures hit both "sexy" and "cute" even as they shifted shape and position.

"Space Between Stars"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

Something initially misfied in my brain while watching this, thinking it was about alien astronauts whose spaceship has been overrun by robots, when it's actually the other way around, with those cute octopi actually being the interstellar equivalent of parasites being fought off by the ship's automatic defenses. That's kind of the point, minus the credentialed dummy missing a couple of important seconds to write something down: Both are travelers in the void, doing what evolution or engineers have made them to do, their conflict inevitable and as fierce as anything in nature, with human viewers subconsciously taking sides for entirely superficial reasons.

Part of the reason for being able to take such a claim is that it is consciously and brilliantly designed, with the aliens in round shapes pastel blues and while the machines are foreboding reds. The audience is perhaps hypersensitive to that because director Samuel W. Bradley and his animators present the action with the smooth lines and bold palette of an infographic, switching the brain into learning mode and helping the viewer pick up geography, capabilities, and the like as the well-orchestrated and high-stakes action (accompanied by a nifty Jim Guthrie score) begins. From there, it's smooth and thrilling, despite the way that its abstraction could be distancing.

"The Ricochet Splendid"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)

It's hard to review "The Ricochet Splendid" without more or less repeating what it says in the festival program or sounding like you're trying to write a blurb for the program: It's the terrific opening credits for an anime series that sadly does not really exist. I kind of doubt that 2Veinte has any plans to make a series out of it, because it's probably too big to fit the budget, but I am impressed as heck that filmmaker Pablo Gostanian so often manages to find a spot where a viewer will think "not sure if parody or awesome" at least two or three times. It's a canny act of pastiche, with its footage deliberately leaving a lot of gaps that might be hard to reconcile, action that is over the top but maybe not more than the real thing, and a legitimately catchy theme song and a title that, like a lot of Japanese adventure series, seems pretty meaningless but sure as heck sounds cool.

I'll take more if you've got it, but enjoy it as a singular work otherwise.

"Crying Bitch"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

Well, there's a title I'll have a hard time recommending to the women I know who would probably enjoy the heck out of this short. I love you when you're at your weirdest, Japan, but you don't always make it easy!

Still, I enjoy the heck out of this one, which offers Sho Mineo as a philandering husband, Miko Terada as his young lover, and Hinako Saeki as the wife who is just about ready to snap. Writer/director Reiki Tsuno often builds the movie like it, personally, is about to snap, with sudden changes from day to night implying that something you're taking as a given might flip instantly, with violence that may be spontaneous and excessive or reluctantly practiced, but which is probably a long time coming but hard to stop.

The film seems a little rough at times, like there was a hard cap on how much they could shoot so they accepted good enough rather than perfect, but it's a steady good enough, and the conception and editing was solid enough to hold that together. That leaves "Crying Bitch" memorable inn its outrageousness, but not sloppy or poorly-executed.

Kamera wo Tomeru na! (One Cut of the Dead)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)

It's not unusual to have a conversation about a television show and have someone say that the first year isn't very good, but if you hang in there for something like fifteen hours, it starts to get good, but also occasionally have the same people say that they turned a movie off ten minutes in. One Cut of the Dead is an odd movie because is more or less counts on at least part of the audience cutting it the same slack they would a serial whose early segments aren't actually that good. A risky play, but one that is eventually rewarded.

It opens in fairly conventional manner, in some sort of abandoned factory setting with a zombie attacking his girlfriend - a scene ruined by the boom operator (Hiroshi Ichibara) being caught in the shot, but by actor Kazuki Kamiya (Kazuki Nagaya) apparently not not committing fully to his part as the zombie, for which director Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) excoriates him after yelling cut. But the camera keeps rolling, capturing makeup artist Nao (Harumi Syuhama) telling Kazuki and co-star Aika Matsumoto (Yuzuki Akiyama) that the director is just high-strung, and there are actually legends about the place where they are shooting - legends which appear to be all too true, which means Higurashi will have a heck of a one-shot zombie movie, at least if anybody survives the shooting.

How much a viewer likes cheap, cheesy zombie movies is an important factor in how much they will enjoy One Cut of the Dead, because while that description above is not the entirety of what the movie has to offer, it is a long unbroken stretch where filmmaker Shinichiro Ueda is not spoofing sub-streaming zombie movies or presenting it with any sort of irony or wink at the audience - it is effectively what it appears to be, with the long-take gimmick feeling like an overreach. Some folks go for that, and they'll probably dig that first half-hour or so on its own merits, but if that's not your thing, it is a lot of pretty awful set-up to get to a hilarious last act - you have to dig through three layers of bad to get to the good stuff, and that good stuff doesn't really work without the bad. Throw some bland flashback material in, and It is a slog for nearly an hour to get to 30 minutes of good material.

Full review at EFC.

Five Fingers for Marseilles

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

Five Fingers for Marseilles is being labeled a "South African Western", which describes it as well as anything but also doesn't feel quite right. There's too much history to the characters, and not enough frontier, but that seems a bit like quibbling. It feels more like a western than anything else, especially once it gets to the end.

The action opens not in the South African city of Marseilles, but "Railway", the black-populated township that was just outside, during the apartheid era, and introduces six kids: Zulu, the group's leader; Tau, his hard-headed brother; "Pastor" Unathi the storyteller; "Pockets" Bongani, from a richer family; "Cockroach" Luyanda, a big, quiet boy - the "five fingers" who fancy themselves rebels - and Lerato, the girl the brothers both like. A clash with the white police sends Tau on the run, where he'll eventually become an outlaw. Twenty years later, he's released from prison and decides to return home, though the Marseilles that Tau (Vuyo Dabula) finds is different: Zulu has died and his son Sizwe (Lizwi Vilakazi) is having little luck as a farmer, while Lerato (Zethu Dlomo) is one of the few that has stayed in Railway after main city's integration. Pockets (Kenneth Nkosi) is mayor, Luyanda (Mduduzi Mabaso) is chief of police, but both of them tend to let a gangster calling himself "The Ghost" (Hamilton Dhlamini) have his way. Tau had hoped to live a quiet life, but it looks like his hometown still needs heroes.

Five Fingers takes the shape of a Western, and a beautiful one. The deserts and scrublands of South Africa feel just as open as those of California, dangerous and beautiful. Director Michael Matthews and his crew never pretend that it's anything but the late twentieth century, but by and large make the movie feel like it's got a foot in multiple eras - the shantytown of Railway feels like a western town, there aren't a lot of familiar product logos on display, and some of the wardrobe and prop choices feel meant to evoke another era even if they are modern. If a weapon seems personalized and weathered, it doesn't really matter that it's a Kalashnikov. Matthews and cinematographer Shaun Lee happily quote Sergio Leone, sometimes using kids with slingshots, sometimes with their weary adult selves. The raids by the Ghost are horrific and violent.

Full review at EFC.

Fantasia 2017.20: Spoor, The Endless, and Prey

Tuesday was a pretty short day, but it got a lot of bang for the buck, as Spoor was one that Paul Kazee was playing up throughout the festival and delivered, while The Endless was perhaps my personal most anticipated, since I quite liked Resolution and absolutely adore Spring, and the latest from the folks who made those was a must-see.



It's worth noting that The Endless was one of the press screenings I didn't have a conflict with, but the Q&A the filmmakers did for Resolution was one of the most informative and entertaining I'd seen at a festival, so why not wait until they'll be there? So here's Fantasia's Mitch Davis with the film's Justin Benson (center) and Aaron Moorhead (right), and as expected, the pair were very funny while also talking pretty openly about the film, from how it actually started as a comedy, then was supposed to be a bit smaller in scale, but eventually built up. There was a lot of talk about how crucial sound design was to the film, because some scenes went from terrible to great once they got the ambient sound right, and they drove themselves nuts with some sounds near the end, because every time they tried to get something out of a library, it didn't work - great sound effect, but it sounds like Star Trek.

It was a really fun Q&A, but there's a lot that shouldn't be repeated until The Endless manages to find distribution and release, because of a lot of the discussion and enthusiasm was for something that shows up in the back end of the movie which made the audience absolutely go nuts when we realized what we were seeing, and it would not be fair to deny other people that discovery.

It's a good one, though. Once again, can't wait to see what they do next.



The Q&A for Prey, on the other hand, wasn't exactly a bummer, but you could clearly get the sense that it didn't go the way Mitch was hoping - the name of Dick Maas (right) just didn't ring a bell with much of the audience when Mitch tried to get us revved up, really not until he mentioned that Maas wrote and directed Sint. After the movie, he was pretty frank about how making films like this in the Netherlands was becoming exceptionally difficult - Prey had a $3M budget, compared to the $1-2M most Dutch films have, and as he pointed out, a single sequence would have taken over a million dollars in CGI if he'd gone to one of the big international effect houses. It also didn't do nearly as well as expected in the Netherlands, so he was sounding pessimistic about getting something similar off the ground in the future.

On the other hand, Mitch being astounded that the wheelchairs in the movie (one with tank treads that could climb stairs, one a Segway-derived design) were real things was kind of delightful.

Last day today, and since the big-name shows in Hall have already got dates in Boston, I'll be spending it in de Seve watching Indiana, Le Manoir, Kills on Wheels, and The Night Watchmen

Pokot (Spoor)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)

My first impression of Spoor was not quite that it was a "when animals attack" movie told from the point of view of the eccentric old woman that the young protagonists initially disbelieve, although that was certainly in my head once we had enough twenty-something characters for a love triangle. I've got no idea whether that was something the filmmakers had in their heads at any point, and suspect they didn't, especially if you figure that they really weren't making a horror movie, but instead a genre movie that was actually interested in older people - which is something they've done exceptionally well.

The principle one is Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka) - not "Janina", not "Ms. Duszejko", just "Duszejko", if you please - a former civil engineer who likes the fresh air and open spaces of the small Polish town near the Czech border to which she's semi-retired (she teaches English part-time at the elementary school and the kids love her), but hates the hunting culture that surrounds her, which is part and parcel to a larger tolerance for cruelty and indifference to animals. When a neighbor dies, her first impulse is to describe him as a cruel poacher, and she's got little but disdain for Jarek Wnetrzak (Borys Szyc) and the fox "farm" he runs, though she's quite fond of his girlfriend Maria "Good News" Chica (Patrycja Volny), hoping she'll see the crush Dyzio (Jakub Gierszal), the local police department's IT specialist, has on her. Of course, when she and Dyzio find a dead body in the snow, he isn't much more ready to give credence to Duszejko's observation that there are deer tracks leading to the body than anybody else. But as more bodies of hunters pile up during the ensuing months, it starts to look like she may be onto something.

You'll find characters like Duszejko in a lot of horror movies, hanging around the margins, tragically sacrificed as their warnings aren't heeded, and seeing her at the center is an interesting perspective. Even considering that, it's almost shocking when, midway through, a character we've seen a couple times and maybe not given a great deal of eastern looks at her with actual interest, then she later clicks with the older entomologist who discovers one of the bodies... And it doesn't get particularly contentious because they're too old and have been through too much to waste time like that. It seems genuinely exciting to see a movie like this built around people who are at retirement age without making a joke or point of it; they're just the characters the filmmakers saw as interesting people, and not just because they're sensible and experienced: They're individuals informed by their age, but not entirely defined by that.

Full review on EFC.

The Endless

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)

Aaron Morehead & Justin Benson have not only not made a bad movie yet, but they're 3-for-3 in making fantastic films that at some point make the viewer's eyes bulge with delight at one point or another when it becomes clear that they are doing something really clever. The Endless is no exception, building tension in an almost conventional way and then making sure that both the things that build mystery and resolve it are genuinely thrilling.

Benson & Morehead also star in the movie, and they wind up doing pretty well there too, nailing a great dynamic as brothers who escaped from a cult ten years ago and have never been quite right since, and they work well with the folks who do this for a living. It's fun to watch them play off each other.

And then... well, can't tell you. But sharp-eyed horror fans will love where this goes.

"Health, Wealth & Happiness"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)

I'll be curious to see how "Health, Wealth & Happiness" fits in with the other two "Albion Tales" shorts when they wind up placed next to each other and even edited together into a single work. This one is good enough, a three-wishes story with an ironic ending that doesn't really go into surprising places, with even the twisting-of-wishes gotcha being something it feels like we've seen before.

On the plus side, though, is a very nice two-person cast who take these very familiar parts and give them a little more personality than they might have. MyAnna Buring plays this sort of aggressive, not threatened by any man role a lot, but she's exceptionally good at it, and Alex Hassell takes a plain sort of role and does a great riff as he discovers that he's got a posher accent to go with the spiffy clothes he accidentally wished himself into. It's funny and weird and more real than you might expect, even as the rest of the film is kind of straightforward.

Prooi (Prey)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)

Prey is, make no bones about it, a silly extra-large-animal-attacks-humans movie, but it's one that is exceptionally well aware of precisely what audiences want from that sort of picture. There not really a single sequence that doesn't play out with exactly the beats that one might expect for this sort of B-movie, and the film in general plays out as you'd expect.

Fortunately, director Dick Maas is a B-movie pro, and he hits the right notes at the right moments, so that while the film never really has great moments of surprise and shock, it's very satisfying in terms of execution, there's a certain comfort to knowing that this is what a killer-animal movie is supposed to do and this is what it does, with the moments of black comedy feeling more genuine than ironic.

And, for a small-budgeted movie, he does all right. The cast is by and large capable and amiable (even if the boyfriend feels utterly unnecessary), and the lion effects are decent. The CGI lions aren't necessarily quite up to having daylight scenes, but they work well enough when there's some shade and cover, while the animatronic lions are pretty good. Gore moments are effective without being excessively gruesome.

Folks who like Maas's work and killer-animal movies should fond it pretty good, and I know there's more than a few, so enjoy, guys!

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2015 Day #04: Boy 7

It's been a bit over a month, and we've had warm enough temperatures to see some melting over the part few days, so if anybody reading this has forgotten how much February sucked weather-wise, let me remind you: It was terrible, and it brought the MBTA to its knees. Mondays tended to be the worst, and in this case, after working from home, the sensible decision would have been to skip a night or two of the festival, especially since the subway was going to shut down while I was in the theater, making the trip home more difficult.

But I paid money for this festival pass, and it was unlikely that this screening would be made up at any time I could see it (the original plan actually turned out to be that it would, but I'll get to that mess). So I took the Red Line to Davis Square, bought some snacks to make opening a little more worth the Somerville Theatre's effort, and sat down.

The movie began several minutes early. There were no subtitles, a problem, as it is from The Netherlands and Nederlander doesn't overlap much with English at all.

Realizing it had started too early, the guys at the theater stopped it, two more folks arrived, and then it started again on time. Still no subtitles. At that point, I admit, we engaged in some of the behavior I would normally castigate others for in just about any other situation: We talked, sometimes making jokes and sometimes just confirming that what we thought was going on was really going on (the jokes kind of help with that, maybe as a way of confirming that we were following the action without it becoming a conversation that really pulls our attention from the action and subtitles). We pulled out phones and tablets, downloaded the proper language sets for Google Translate, and pointed the microphones at the screen, but to no avail. Either the lousy reception in the underground theater - my old phone did better connecting to a weak Comcast WiFi signal than Verizon 4G there, and the situation is not much different with the new one - or the likely case that the phone is built to pick up sound from inches away rather than even the loudest background noise kept that plan from working.

The next night, we would learn that Garen had intended to play it in the Marathon - I'm not sure whether that plan came before or after realizing that the snow would keep all but the stupidest of us away from what he was billing as a world premiere - but having a DCP with no subs apparently scorched that plan. That's too bad; it's a slick, decent little movie that will probably make no sort of impression on America at all, and what's a film festival for if not to give people a chance to see something good that the regular schedules won't play?

Eventually, it ended, we had a laugh about the weird experience, and headed home. For me, that initially meant heading across the street to catch the 91 bus back to Harvard Square, which is a relatively short walk from my house, but it never showed, just disappearing from the bus tracking app on my phone after being marked as arriving in two minutes for a solid quarter-hour. So I walked home. Not as hard as you would think - the snow want coming down very hard by that point, the wind was mild, and both Somerville and Cambridge are pretty good about cleaning off sidewalks. I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone, though, and it's probably more effort than this movie (in this form) and event deserves. Of course, in a few months/years, this will just be an anecdote I tell to people who don't realize how good they have it when attending a film festival.

Boy 7

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, DCP)

It's probably best to disclose this up front rather than as a "hey, guess what?" thing at the end: Through some sort of series of miscommunications and other slip-ups, Boy 7 was shown without subtitles, and rescheduling was more or less impossible what with the blizzards that hit New England that month. Given the choice of seeing it that way and not seeing it all after dragging myself out in the snow, I bought some popcorn and settled in. Please keep the fact that I don't speak Dutch in mind if you continue reading, perhaps pondering the question of whether the fact that I feel confident enough to write the review owes to director Lourens Blok doing a fine job of communicating through action and visuals or the story itself just being predictable enough that you don't need to hear the words.

It starts, more or less, with a young man (Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen) regaining consciousness on the Subway just before all hell breaks loose. His memory lost, he escapes with Lara (Ella-June Henrard), a girl who possesses the same extraordinary urban combat skills he does and tells him that his name is Sam. Between what she tells him and a journal he apparently handed off for safekeeping, he discovers that they were juvenile offenders with high-level skills (he was a hacker) trained to be super-agents, although Sam, Lara, and Sam's roommate Louis (Yannick Jozefzoon) smelled a rat and attempted to plot an escape.

This all comes in flashbacks that I presume are triggered by Sam reading his diary, although it's a bit of a toss-up as to whether those memories returning in such clear, linear fashion or the diary being phenomenally detailed is more unlikely. It's not actually a bad storytelling device, but it creaks at times - there is certainly more than one moment when Dam seems to be writing in the notebook because he expects to lose his memory at some point in the near future. Given the apparent brainwashing going on, it's not a totally unreasonable idea, although one would think he'd highlight certain things. To be fair, they are things that the perfectly obvious to the audience well before Sam catches on. Maybe he just had a higher expectation of his own intelligence than screenwriters Marco van Geffen and Philip del Maar (working from a novel by Mirjam Mous) did.

Full review at EFC.

Short Stuff: The 2014 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

The definition of "short film" is broader than some might imagine, and the length of the various programs of short films nominated for the Academy Awards this year demonstrates this: As usual, the documentaries were all a half hour to forty minutes long, requiring they be split into two programs in most theaters; the live-action shorts make for a two-hour block... And all five animated shorts together run 47 minutes.

So, it's hardly surprising that the full program gets padded out with a half-hour more of fine animated entertainment. Among all of these, which is the best (or at least, the best bet if you want to pick up some points in your Oscar pool)?

Quick links:
"Me and My Moulton"
"Feast"
"The Bigger Picture"
"A Single Life"
"The Dam Keeper"
"Sweet Cocoon"
"Footprints"
"Duet"
"Bus Story"

"Me and My Moulton"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"Me and My Moulton" isn't a bad bet; filmmaker Torill Kove has already won the category once and her new one - reminiscing about growing up as the second of three daughters of a pair of modernist architects that she wished were "normal" like the family in the apartment downstairs for parents - is funny, sweet, and occasionally rather clever. This is her third film to be nominated and could easily be her second win.

Part of the reason why is just how smoothly it demonstrates the competing impulses at play: Kove's drawings are simple and unpretentious as opposed to obviously stylized, and she has a great deal of fun with jokes that may seem kind of silly - lots of kids falling off their parents' weird three-legged-chairs - and the message to be taken from it is pretty clear. And yet, you can see that the modernism has influenced her: The animated Torill and her sisters line up precisely, for instance, and architectural drawings give parts of the movie structure. It lets the pride in her family's intellectual eccentricity mingle with her desire to connect more broadly in most every frame, letting what's already a good-looking and funny movie resonate just a little more.

"Feast"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Another reasonable prediction might be "Feast", if only because it was likely seen and enjoyed by the most people, having been attached to Disney's release of Big Hero 6. It really is an adorable little movie, following Winston, a stray dog taken in by a young man who is happy to share his greasy human food with him - at least, until he meets a girl with more sophisticated tastes.

As you might expect from a Disney production, it's a slick little short, although animated in a style more akin to the company's Oscar-winning "Paperman" (which director Patrick Osborne also worked on) than the more rigidly three-dimensional film it played with. It's also the sort of thing that makes one wonder about how editing is done in this sort of production, as Osborne and editor Jeff Draheim love cutting from scene to scene in a way that is so precise that it must be mapped out before as much as pieced together later. It's funny and adorable and it moves, even if the action is often kind of rooted, which is a nifty accomplishment.

"The Bigger Picture"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Of the five nominees, Daisy Jacobs's "The Bigger Picture" is probably the most ambitious, design-wise: She and her animators appear to draw her characters right on the walls of her setting, although arms will stretch out to interact with objects in the foreground. It's a nifty bit of optical illusion - that interaction looks a bit off, and in giving it that sort of three-dimensionality, Jacobs tends to shatter the trick of the eye that results in the two-dimensional drawings scanning as 3D when the viewer looks at them.

It would be nice, perhaps, if the story wasn't roughly as flat as the drawings. It's a fairly simple story about one son being successful out in the world while the other is dutiful toward his ailing mother, although she doesn't seem to recognize him as such. It plays out in just about the way one would expect, only the mother seems batty enough that actions and motivations get rather muddled midway through. It's nifty to look at, though, as much as any of the nominees.

"A Single Life"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

"A Single Life" is, more than many animated shorts, one joke, but it's a good one - a woman living by herself receives a strange vinyl record with apparent time-travel properties. In the movie's three minutes, the filmmakers hit most of the variations one is likely to imagine, but just because the gags are the ones that follow most obviously from the premise doesn't mean they don't work.

Because they do; the character model is simple but cheerful, establishing her personality and situation quickly. It's also malleable, which is of great importance with the gags being so visual. The song on the record by Happy Camper is pretty nice as well, and it's not hard to appreciate just how well the filmmakers get in, make their jokes and points, and get out without being overly sentimental.

"The Dam Keeper"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Filmmakers Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tstsumi are inventive right from the start of their short "The Dam Keeper", as the dam in question is not a wall to keep water out but a windmill holding suffocating pollution away from its city of anthropomorphic animals. It's maintained by a young pig, whose attention to its inner workings leave him dirty and still unappreciated by his schoolmates, at least until a cute fox whose charcoal drawings tend to leave her with blackened paws sits next to him on the bus.

It's a wonderful little film, packed with great visual designs and details - it instantly conjures up a makeshift city in a post-apocalyptic world that has gotten too comfortable because it forgets about the smoke outside. Lars Mikkelsen's narration sets just the right tone, and the way the story plays out pulls no punches - the bullies who terrorize the pig are not pompous and ineffectual but cruel and focused, and what happens when he fears he has lost his only friend is genuinely scary and wrenching. The result is dramatic and impressive with just the right amount of softening from the funny-animal setting.

"Sweet Cocoon"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

The first of four "Highly Commended" animated films to get the package padded out to feature length is "Sweet Cocoon", and it's one of the best examples of the French sense of humor I can recall seeing. It's a dialogue-free comedy about a fat caterpillar that just cannot fit inside its cocoon (which I don't think is the way such things work, but never mind that), needing the help of two older beetles. It's slapstick that somehow seems to have a certain level of restraint, whimsical cartooning that nevertheless hasn't had its more adult edges sanded off, and the occasional important bit that's actually kind of mean because there's a belief that you can push a joke further than you can in real life.

I dig it; the five writer/directors who collaborated on it come up with good gags and render them very nicely. Still, while I laughed at how this sort of thing goes from cute to cruel at the blink of an eye, that may not be everyone's bag.

"Footprints"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Another, more specific, recognizable sensibility is that of animator Bill Plympton, who has produced new cartoons at an impressively steady rate for about thirty years now. His latest, "Footprints", is instantly recognizable as his, even if it is one of the trippiest things he's done in recent years.

It starts with a man awakened by a noise outside his door and chasing it, his brain imagining ever-worsening things. There's an eerie edge to it even beyond the basics of the set-up, as Plympton uses the style which has allowed his more comedic cartoons to be edgy to allow his protagonist's world and fears to be shadowy and undefined, even as his growing use of digital tools for compositing and coloring seems to give other elements a more solid presence than some of his earlier works, even last year's feature Cheatin'.

"Duet"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

Continuing on the theme of distinctive styles, it would not be completely surprising if you figured "Duet" as being the short in this block that came from Disney - Glen Keane may be directing for the first time, but he's been the character lead for the stars of some of Disney's greatest hits (he was in charge of Belle, Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tarzan, and Rapunzel), and I believe was at one point in line to direct a feature there. Instead, this short was made in association with Google, of all places.

It's a pretty terrific-looking short, about a boy and a girl (and the boy's dog) who have been drawn together since childhood, although their respective devotion to athletics and dance demand a great deal of focus. The style feels like raw pencils with what are often absent backgrounds, but despite that, the film really excels at communicating the pair's story - in a way, it distills the entire thing down to Keane's skills at character design and animation. Things play out to Scot Stafford's soundtrack in perfect harmony.

"Histoires de bus" ("Bus Story")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (Oscar Shorts, DCP)

The last of the "Highly Commended" runners-up is "Bus Story", from Qubeçoise animator Tali, a tale presented in autobiographical style about a woman who, having always seen school bus drivers as cheerful and important parts of the community takes a job as one only to find that this good cheer can be hard to maintain.

At 11 minutes, it's one of the longer shorts in the program, and it's kind of flatly paced at that; things happen but they don't seem to lead to the conclusion so much as the end is just another event. It also suffers a bit from being what Chuck Jones called "animated radio", with a great deal of narration. The best bits of storytelling are visual, as seasons change with a whump or the narrator's eyes go wide with disaster. the style also fits the blue-collar atmosphere a story about a small-town school bus driver should have, though, with the characters having big hooks for feet and simple, exaggerated faces.


All of the shorts included are fairly impressive, though of the five nominees, "The Dam Keeper" is clearly the cream, and what I'd put down as the winner, although the pedigrees of "Me and My Moulton" and "Feast" may provide it with some competition. But since all are available online (either as a package or in most cases individually), it is well worth checking them out for yourself.