movies: animation shorts 2

As Forrest Gump famously said, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get"... well, a session of Animation short films is also like a box of chocolates... although sometimes you get a batch that are mostly things with coconut and hard toffee...

On balance, the Animation Shorts 2 session wasn't quite that bad, I think that the good outweighed the bad, if only the bad didn't take quite so long to finish...

In chronological order:

The Henhouse (7 min)
The tale of a fox who becomes people? Interesting and a good use of music to take the place of dialogue.

Bruce (4 min)
What if Bruce Willis was a tiny block of spam powered by a USB remote and made to replicate the plot to Die Hard... this was quite funny in parts, although a little uncomfortably weird at the end.

The Astronomer's Sun (6 min)
This had shades of Tim Burton about it... or possibly just undertones. But with a clockwork teddy bear, a strange machine and a childhood memory this was one of the two best shorts in the whole program.

Maska (23 min)
BORING! Also, completely incomprehensible, with subtitles and about 20 minutes too long. I very nearly fell asleep a number of times... this was absolutely HORRIBLE!

Scary Therapy (5 min)
I think I've seen these before between shows on SBS, cute little interludes with less than scary monsters on the therapists couch.

A Family Portrait (5 min)
An interesting photo based animation style, with an all too realistic story of a family portrait going horrible wrong.

Mother of Many (6 min)
This was dedicated to the director's mother who was a midwife and it was a beautiful, if occasionally borderline graphic, look at a woman who helps women to bring babies into the world.

The Wonder Hospital (12 min)
I'm not sure if part of this was supposed to be in actual 3D, but we didn't have any glasses for that... I'm also not completely sure what was going on with this short... it was promising and then it all went a bit too weird.

Angry Man (20 min)
A quite confronting look at a child who's father succumbs to "The Angry Man" who yells and breaks things and hits his mother... possibly a great one for showing to similarly aged children to let them know that it's okay to tell.

Alma (6 min)
And then we have Alma. I've actually seen Alma before, and it was part of the reason that I wanted to see tonight's session rather than last night's session... Alma is sweet, dark, beautifully realised and gorgeously rendered.

All in all not the best selection of short films, but there were a couple of gems in there.

It's also a little hard to give the whole thing one score.

yani's rating: Alma and The Astronomer's Sun get 4 animate inanimate objects out of 5... everything else averages out at about 1 confused plotline out of 5...