Alexanne Desrosiers’s Les Abeilles Domestiques sees humanity as domestic bees hounded by impending doom
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, December 29
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.animationshowofshows.com
Since 1997, producer and curator Ron Diamond has been presenting The Animation Show of Shows, an annual collection of animated short films from around the world, celebrating the vast array of innovation in the medium. The nineteenth edition of the series opens December 29 at the Quad, featuring sixteen works from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, England, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States, with an overarching theme of finding one’s place and seeking connections in a world exploding with natural beauty despite our growing dependence on technology. The ninety-minute compilation opens with Quentin Baillieux’s thumping music video for Charles X’s “Can You Do It,” which equates the street and the elite via a horse race through Los Angeles. That is followed by Lia Bertels’s exquisite Tiny Big, consisting of individual 2D hand-drawn scenes of “everyday dancers possessed by the spirits of earth, love & money,” made up of minimalist black-and-white line drawings with occasional bursts of color, backed with subtle sounds of wind and water, along with spare piano music based on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and boasting a wry sense of humor. Two-time Oscar winner Pete Docter’s (Up, Inside Out) 1990 short, Next Door, is about a young girl with a vast imagination playing outside, annoying the old man who lives next door; she is surrounded by circles, while he is trapped in a square environment. Jac Clinch’s The Alan Dimension follows the travails of a middle-aged man named Alan, who can see six minutes into the future, believing that he is “the next step in cognitive evolution,” becoming obsessed with his power and angering his wife; BAFTA nominee Clinch uses stop-motion, 2D, and CG animation that includes photographic backgrounds that enhance the overall atmosphere. Paul Julian and Les Goldman’s 1964 warning, Hangman, which was made for classrooms and is based on a poem by Maurice Ogden, has been lovingly restored and is as relevant as ever; the film unfolds like a picture book brought to life, with frames reminiscent of paintings by Dali and de Chirico and narration by Herschel Bernardi.
In The Battle of San Romano, Georges Schwitzgebel animates the painting by Paolo Uccello about the war between Florence and Siena; Aurore Gal, Clémentine Frère, Yukiko Meignien, Anna Mertz, Robin Migliorelli, and Romain Salvini’s Gokurosama is like a computer game loaded with sight gags as a woman is taken to a mall chiropractor; Kobe Bryant honors himself with the autobiographical Dear Basketball, directed by Disney veteran Glen Keane and with a score by Oscar-winning composer John Williams; Alan Watts narrates David O’Reilly’s Everything; Steven Woloshen’s Casino is set to Oscar Peterson’s “Something Coming” and drawn directly on film stock; Alexanne Desrosiers’s Les Abeilles Domestiques sees humanity as “domestic bees,” one long take of a hive mind comprising cool visual and aural connections; Tomer Eshed’s Our Wonderful Nature: The Common Chameleon riffs on nature documentaries; Elise Simard uses mixed media on paper, cut-out animation, photography, and video in Beautiful Like Elsewhere; and Robert Löbel & Max Mörtl’s Island builds a bizarre community out of playful shapes, colors, and sounds. Perhaps the most realistic and emotional film is Parallel Studio’s Unsatisfying, a series of quick clips of things going wrong over melancholy music; its popularity led to the Unsatisfying challenge, in which people were invited to animate other failures, which you can see here. Which brings us to the pièce de résistance, Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s Hollywood musical takeoff, The Burden, about loneliness and existential anxiety experienced by night workers, starring upright fish at the Hotel Long Stay, mice at a fast-food restaurant, monkeys at a call center, and dogs in a supermarket. The characters break out into song, making such declarations as “I have no one to be with / I don’t know why / Or actually I do know why” and “But I have my own dreams / my own needs / I don’t demand much / My life is drifting away.” The models and puppets are all handmade, the score was written by Hans Appelqvist and recorded live by a sixteen-piece orchestra, and the choreography and camera angles are worthy of Busby Berkeley. It’s a statement of our times, and a deeply entertaining and thought-provoking one at that. Over the years, The Animation Show of Shows has screened three dozen shorts that went on to garner Oscar nominations, with ten winning the award. Several of the works in the nineteenth edition are deserving of awards as well, first and foremost The Burden, which has deservedly taken home many international prizes.