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Morbid Afternoon

An afternoon of death and comedy, featuring corpses that don’t fit in coffins, suicidal furries, numerous ill-fated rabbits, and Hitler at the 1948 Olympics.

Elkland

A darkly comic drama about a man returning home after his father’s death. Very funny, very Swedish (so I’m stereotyping, but it’s Bergmanesque, if you squint), very short (barely an hour), and quite touching. Also, there’s an elk called Holger.

(Screened with a fairly arbitrarily chosen short film, Roma, that would have worked better alongside Sin Nombre. Doesn’t change my opinion of short films, but there are some lovely sequences of the workings of a soap and detergent factory.)

McLaren Animation 1

A decent selection, the bulk of which seemed to be from the National Film and Television School. Highlights include Yellow Belly End (rotoscoped in a minimalist style, featuring people in animal costumes throwing themself off a cliff, and the canary who records each one in a little notebook – a page for dogs, a page for cats, several pages for lemmings…) and Goodbye Mr Pink (a mix of live action and large-scale stop-motion, with a girl coming to terms with the death of her rabbit and her brother attempting an autopsy).

I also liked Photograph Of Jesus, which animates the odder enquiries made to an image archive with cut-out photographs, including the aforementioned Hitler at the 1948 London Olympics. It’s a little reminiscent of some of the enquiries I’ve fielded at work…

Quite liked Today Only: liked the style, but it kind of lost me at the naked fairies (not because they were naked, just that it was a random moment too far)