quiet trickster

Ah, Pixar. Doesn’t that make you grin, just thinking about it?

(And OK, it caused my first miss-timing of the festival, as it was either delayed or much longer than I thought when I was buying the tickets, because it finished just as the McLaren Animation 2 screening started at the Filmhouse, 20 minutes walk away… So, not quite sure what I missed there - liking the simple line/pen drawing styles, but also the live action/stop-motion/flipbook relationship angst thing, which is unlike me - Also the retro-style nursing home action pic, which is far more my thing. But haven’t I seen that found footage/collage/toy car noir before? These, making the mixed media work…)

Anyway, Pixar - Ratatouille (Firefox’s US spell checker wants to substitute ‘Bouillabaisse’, which is interesting…): It feels a little predictable to say that it’s not as good as Pixar at it’s best, but it’s still miles better than anything else in the mainstream.

Case in point - I felt that the character design for the human characters didn’t have the snap that some of their stuff has had - it’s a problem that’s always plagued CG, even for Pixar, like Brad Bird’s previous film, The Incredibles. But compared to the blocky, un-differentiated characters in the Shrek films, they’ve far more personality. The rats themselves work better - they don’t have the ‘Wow’ factor Pixar sometimes achieve (we already know Pixar can do fur) - but there are some superb little touches. The switches from rat to human perspective are handled wonderfully - the rats’ voices transformed to the squeak of, well, rats - and they catch the skittering movement of rats perfectly.

Bird’s forte seems to be the heart-stopping action sequence - this, as with The Incredibles, has several break-neck sequences. Animation has the benefit of being capable of achieving a more fully immersive perspective than live-action - in the case of one sequence, literally. That sequence, early in the film, as our rat hero, Remy, is separated from his family and flung headlong through the sewers of Paris, has just that extra flair of image and sound design that lifts it up above the common.

But there’s no truly sublime moment in the film - either visually, like the seascapes in Finding Nemo, or verbally, like Toy Story’s “You are a strange, sad little man…”, or - I could go on. (Bird’s first feature, The Iron Giant, is one of the few films I’ve had to stop, mid-DVD, because we were laughing so hard we had to catch our breath - that, from a simple visual joke executed perfectly…). And there’s a part of me that thinks Pixar will never surpass the short film Luxo, Jr., on which their logo is based… But then, it’s probably a little churlish to expect sublime from a kid’s movie (the kids loved it) - particularly when I’ll put up with much, much less from any other studio, whether animation or live-action.

It is great fun, and while the story is not groundbreaking, and some of the jokes are past their best-buy (I can’t believe I just wrote that), and the logic of having French characters speak with accents in the ‘Allo ‘Allo mold, while the French rats all sound American, is shaky - it has verve, and a sincerity that had me surreptitiously wiping away a tear. (Mind you, that could just have been me coming down from the pick ‘n’ mix sugar high. Besides, Die Hard makes me cry…)

Pixar always make me wish I had the patience to be an animator…

From which the most pertinent observation might be - where cel or handdrawn, claymation or stopmotion animation gains a feeling of individuality when it’s a little scruffy or unpolished, CG merely looks shite.

OK, that’s harsh - the two examples here were screened consecutively, and were both trying to be ponderously enigmatic about sex, which is a bad enough idea when your characters don’t look like poorly textured computer game characters. But I never understand why shoddy CG short animation never seems to escape the scrutiny aimed at larger productions.

I realise that the amount of computer power involved is prohibitive, but shouldn’t that mean the animators find a way to use the limitations of the medium? And unless it’s simply a skills showcase (for their sakes, one hopes not), can’t they find a writer? Because even if the animation is glorious, it isn’t a film unless it has something to say or reveal. A few years ago, one of the selected ‘World’ animations was a Dreamworks showcase, all slinky CG movement and texture - technically remarkable, but with no content. The audience was significantly polite, compared to the enthusiasm they showed for scrappier work. And if the animation is lousy, you better have a killer concept, story or punchline. I’ve seen very shaky student CG fly by because they still made the audience laugh.

I don’t really mean story in that overly pedantic screenwriting course manner - one of the most striking in this set, The Accident, reveals its story in hesitant re-iterations of a childhood memory - all done in a simple pen and ink style.

The films shown in this selection where all very short, which I prefer - more for your money, but unfortunately means that it’s harder to pick out highlights. The others I voted for (the McLaren Award is voted for by the audience) - John and Karen (a charming film about a relationship between a polar bear and a penguin, with a minimalist ligne-claire style that uses tiny character movements to great effect), and the Pearce Sisters (a slightly grisly comic tale involving two sisters living on a desolate island, who gut and smoke more than just the fish they catch, with a striking style, although it’s familiar from somewhere - it’s in a blocky, graphic style I see a lot in things like Computer Arts magazine.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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