Well my first disappointment with the film festival came earlier than I expected. The first thing I saw Saturday was Social Scissors and 4-D Cardboard: Redefining Animation Today and unlike the collection of shorts the night before, it was not full of gems. If Social Scissors is redefining animation then the new definition must include "serious" in it somewhere. A minority of shorts contained any humor at all and they weren't really funny. A phrase which wouldn't be in the new definition is "linear narrative." Not a single one of these contained anything like a story. Now neither of these things are necessarily bad but part of what made the shorts competition so good was the variety in the kinds shorts shown. Also, while a film doesn't have to tell a story, if it doesn't it generally helps to be very interesting visually or to get a point across. Most of these shorts employ animation techniques already very familiar to anyone who's ever seen a collection of animation that didn't originate from Disney, Hanna-Barbara or Japanese anime producers.
"Superhero" was based on a good premise, a real woman who is a superhero. Good jabs are taken at iconography but the film devolves into a repetitive montage.
The one film which I thought was pretty good was "Pong," essentially a music video for a Frank Black song of the same name. Found footage and cut up pictures of Frank are used entertainingly but like some of the others the images are too jumbled to have a lasting effect.
I'm looking at the blurbs for these shorts included in the Chronicle's listings for the first time. Maybe it helps to read these before seeing the films but my feeling is that a film should explain itself. It shouldn't require a "set-up" like a movie clip on a talk show. Looking back I can see what the blurb for "The Red Book" is talking about but movie itself failed to communicate it to me. Some of these blurbs make no sense at all. It says that the world created in "Altair" is "sinister." What's sinister about a toilet floating around the head of a woman cut out of a '40's era magazine?
"Orion's Belt" is listed in the Chronicle but it wasn't shown. The blurb says it's 30 minutes long and considering what the other films are like, it's just as well it wasn't shown..
3/12/95