UWPGFF reveals "Best International Animation" nominees for 2020 Festival
Animations cover gambit from heartbreaking to eye-opening
Jason Pchajek, staff writer
As with the Best International Shorts, the nominees for Best International Animated Short bring their A-game to the 2020 UWPG Film Festival. With the powerhouse animating nations of the United Kingdom and United States matched up against the artistic splendor of France and Austria, the field is set for a fantastic viewing experience.
Some films will leave you somber, clutching your favourite furry friend close, others will make you shiver. Some films will make you shed a tear, while others will make you question your own existence.
Prepare for an emotionally visceral ride with this group.
All You Can Eat – United Kingdom
With an animation style that evokes the surrealist dreams of late-90s and early-2000s Cartoon Network, Dimitris Armenakis’s All You Can Eat provides a powerful critique of the modern meat industry. Juxtaposing the beauty and freedom of a colourful non-industrial world with the bleak, harsh, black-and-white aesthetic of a smog-choked industrial landscape.
In the industrial world, angles are sharp, the spaces claustrophobic, and the air itself feels dense with inky black. It is oppressive, underscored by the pained screams of the colourful, beautifully animated creatures. Concerning the plight of two genderless creatures, desperate to reunite and escape the nightmare before they are killed, personalizes the message.
But the film’s commentary is no less biting because of this.
The fact this film comes from the United Kingdom, heralded as a major flashpoint for the industrial revolution, should surprise nobody.
Companion – United Kingdom
From Courage the Cowardly Dog to Wallace and Gromit. Companion’s stop motion animation is fluid, and the textured clay helps bring wonderfully designed characters to life. The sound design alone is enough to make any dog owner fall apart at the seams, and each character is handled wonderfully, even if they’re on screen for mere seconds.
If you’ve ever owned a dog, this film will be a shot to the heart. It’s whimsical as well as sad, bright as well as somber, watching a young dog take over from the last, only to be replaced one day as it too passes away.
Jack Welton and Joe Helliwell are two supremely talented animators, and if this is what they accomplished in their final year of film school, we can expect amazing things on a larger project.
Applesauce – Austria
Do you know those strange drawings that you find at garage sales? Or are hanging on the wall of your quirky friend’s downtown apartment? The one with abstract imagery, with strange figures, broad scenes that evoke the work of Advard Munch? This is what Applesauce feels like.
It feels like a Shel Silverstein story come to life, as two birds discuss their own existence, and the meaning of their lives, two soldiers dance together, exempted from this existential dread, and two polar bears together work to move past it.
This is the kind of film that will mean a lot to different people. In the age of COVID, when we are confronted by a world and universe that has no care for us, what shall we do? Undoubtedly some will turn inward like, the birds, and like Boris the polar bear, wallowing in their perceived unimportance to an ambivalent universe. While others will be like the soldiers, ignoring the harsh parts of reality, and reveling in the movement of their own bodies, something they can control.
Perhaps we should take a lesson from Amelie the polar bear. “What you need is applesauce.
“Look, first you wash it. Then you peel it. Then you cut it. Then you take the blender and you blend it, the apple.”
Maybe we should all make some applesauce.
Aging – United States
This film is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. Wonderfully animated, scored, and acted, with stellar visual flare and sound design. The way light is used to create a dreamlike view of the world, or depth of field is replicated to draw the audience in to a more intimate and quiet moment. It is stellar.
But at the same time, the content of the film will leave many with a pit in their stomach.
For many, our parents seem like superheroes when we’re little. They’re as tall as mountains, and strong enough to catch lightning in their hands. They are there to protect us. Yet as we grow, we are cursed to watch them age, change, and grow frail. One day we will be the strong ones, the big ones. We’ll turn around and see that our heroes have grown old.
Jingqi Zhang captures this masterfully in just under three minutes. Animated smoothly, with a beautiful art style, Aging is a must-watch for the 2020 festival.
Corpseland – France
This film is the most surreal of the bunch, as Yang Liu uses a mixture of animation styles to show pieces of the human form in twisted and eldritch ways. The art is masterful, with a pen and paper aesthetic creating a creeping sense of gloom and dread.
If David Lynch had designed Disney Land, that would be Corpseland, as Liu critiques modern society and how our bodies are morphed by it to fit its needs. Following a figure from childhood to adulthood, we see the ways our bodily autonomy is attacked, our forms changed, to in Liu’s words “serve a dysfunctional, polluted and twisted society.”
Modern society expects us to look a certain way, act a certain way, and be a certain way. We are socialized and reshaped from a pure form to something that fits the status quo in our world. Think Eraserhead meets Brave New World.
It is haunting, yet beautiful, and Corpseland will for sure leave an impact on its viewers.