Encounters 2015: Animation Highlights (Part 1)
Last week saw Bristol’s Watershed fully immersed in Encounters festivities, with creatives from all corners of the globe coming together to celebrate exciting new work. As usual Skwigly were ever-present to rejoice in the festival’s animation strand, which remains a crucial component of the event. We will be looking back at the highlights of this year’s edition throughout the week, beginning with the first three animated competition screenings put together by Animation Programmer Kieran Argo.
Kicking things off this year is Sensual Delights, a programme generally consisting of experimental work celebrating the visual interplay between music, sound and visuals. Andreas Hykade, ever-reliable as one of today’s most consistently strong filmmakers, delivers as expected with Nuggets, a short parable about the decreasing effectiveness of stimulants, told via a bird whose discovery of an empowering, unknown substance quickly leads to its emotional and physical deterioration. Originally created for Watford’s Big Events with the intention of being projected onto a local jewellery shop, NFTS alum Kim Noce and Shaun Clark’s The Evening Her Mind Jumped Out of Her Head (previously Homeward Bound) translates very well to a short film in its own right. The use of space and composition gives it a unique sense of claustrophia that works well with its humour and story, in which a commuter’s brain finally takes leave of her skull having endured the relentless annoyances of her fellow passengers.
Patrick Buhr’s What I Forgot to Say (Honorable Mention: UWE European New Talent Animation Award) carries with it the vague threat of impenetrability before quickly revealing itself to in fact be an astute and truly witty sendup, lampooning AMSR videos and self-indulgent life hack tutorials as the narrator finds himself constantly branching off into tangents and introspective non sequiturs. Rising animation star Nicolas Ménard’s Loop Ring Chop Drink (the deserved Animated Grand Prix winner) is one of several strong offerings from the Royal College of Art, with a colour palette that takes the human retina to its absolute limit of tolerance yet remains atypically pleasing. As with his prior short Somewhere, the film is character-driven with interweaving narratives, though with a more refined sense of comedic payoff. Another film whose boldness of design stands out is Karolina Specht’s Don’t Lose Your Head, an assortment of looping visuals that develop and adapt as they progress, hurling shapes, faces and disconcerting screams at the audience along the way. Firmly placed on the line between animation and motion graphics, it’s certainly a piece that makes a strong impact with the viewers.
Brilliantly marrying music and visuals are experimental animation veterans Mirai Mizue and Theodore Ushev, the former following up such works as Wonder and Poker with the equally joyous Genius Expo. Ushev, meanwhile, takes a bit of a left turn after the uncompromising severity of his 20th Century Trilogy with Sonámbulo, a playful celebration of the surrealist art movement. Another film to use music as a structural device for its visualisation, albeit in a more direct and literal way, is Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, in which director Alan Warburton has constructed a series of CG environments such as museums and car parks with illuminating lights placed to correspond with the graphical notation of the music itself as the camera travels through them. The visual approach is simplistic yet the musical structure of the composition on which it is based makes it ideal; anything more visually ambitious would, in fact, work against the intent of the film, to elaborate on the subtle nuances of Bach that might not have been acknowledged otherwise.
The festival’s second batch of animated shorts, The March of Time, indulged a more playful side of filmmaking, such as Ülo Pikkov’s tremendous Tik-Tak, wherein a pixilated tinkerer works against a stop-motion backdrop of mechanical miscellany, clockwork gadgets, (not-so) inanimate objects and a mouse whose presence throws his workspace into increasingly abstract disarray. Other films with a more literal connection to the programme’s thematic grouping dealt with the passage of time in a variety of ways. Julien Regnard’s thoughtful piece Somewhere Down The Line, deftly marrying 2D and CG animation, offers snatches of a man’s life story told as one continuous road trip. Ana Stefaniak’s RCA short I May Be Some Time, by contrast, presents a somewhat inverted and more abstract premise as we follow its central character struggling with the revelation that his life is entirely behind him. Whether or not the film’s script lands completely, the character design and visual inventiveness of each scenario remains striking and great fun to look at. Another RCA film Tusk (Rory Waudby-Tolley), a personal highlight, fires on all cylinders, save for a smattering of instances where the colour palette could bear more contrast of saturation. It’s a pedantic gripe when considering the witty pathos of the story and the charm of its sympathic lead, a frozen woolly mammoth revived in an era where she is discriminated against and marginalised.
Many of the stronger films of the screenings have already made their mark on the circuit, though for this reason repeat viewings are always welcome, especially to an audience as receptive as that of the Encounters festival. Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow, while faring better across the pond on the awards front, absolutely slayed the crowd, which comes as no surprise. The more conventional scripted comedy of Aidan McAteer’s Deadly, in which a modern-day grim reaper is first rumbled, then befriended by a feisty nursing home resident, applies an economic approach of asset-based animated television production to far more considered and detailed character design work, with some excellent visual gags (such as the reaper’s handy ‘soul vacuum’) and a charming resolution. Overall the film that lingers the most is Florian Grolig’s In The Distance, which takes the risky approach of isolating all action to one static long-shot (its protagonist fends for himself in his apartment at the top of a high-rise, his location keeping him semi-protected from harm while his city is under siege), expertly edited to create a flow of events imbued with both a strong sense of drama and some fabulous, unexpected moments of physical comedy.
The third programme Close to the Edge expands on the appealing strangeness of the first. On the more accessible end of the spectrum is Vandals, in which a solitary woman must marshal her emotional resources in the face of a series of attacks on her property. A recent film from the astoundingly prolific Adam Wells (Brave New Old, Risehigh, Fake Expectations), Vandals is his first to include narration while retaining his unique approach to CG set design and plane-based character animation. For those who enjoy luxuriating in the more sublimely ridiculous, Minoru Karasube (Unari-chitai), Peter Millard (Unhappy Happy) and Sarina Nihei (Small People With Hats) are on hand to accommodate. Similarly, Croatian artist David Lovric’s richly atmospheric Slom (Breakdown) is a wonderfully bizarre ride featuring a nude, humanoid pachyderm contorting and writhing in sufferance for reasons unknown. While it boasts some instances of very capable and inventive set/prop modeling, in every other conceivable respect Why Did They Come By Train (also from Croatia) misfires, in particular with its astounding ability to misinterpret every known animation principle. Strengthening the programme are the student films Edmond (NFTS, winner of the NextGen Skills Academy Best of British Award) in which director Nina Gantz’s delightfully twisted vision of a life-story in reverse is carried across superbly by talented stop-motion animator Adam Watts, and Stephen McNally’s Meanwhile (RCA), which expertly explores key moments of the lives of four strangers in the lead-up to the event in which their paths will all converge. On top of a fantastic use of colour and design (consistent with the director’s preceding film Forgot), the strength of the writing is such that the audience is made firmly aware of each character’s idiosyncrasies and frailties despite being offered the briefest of glimpses into their past and present concerns.
While retaining the main identifiers of his style, Theodore Ushev’s Blood Manifesto is worlds apart from the previously-discussed Sonámbulo, being made up of a succession of bold, politically-charged imagery animated in the director’s own blood (read our interview which delves into his process here). Though such subject matter and provocative means of execution might prove misguided in the wrong hands, Ushev’s are clearly more than capable, his motives both well-informed and sincere.
Stay with us throughout the week as we bring you more coverage of the standout films and events of this year’s Encounters!