Bottle Short Film Review

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

I'm a fan of stop animation and this film used the technique to great effect. A Sand Person and a Snow Person, living in two very different places, communicate by sending things from their environment in a bottle to drift across the sea to the other. They pass items back and forth, augmenting themselves with these items as they go. In the end, they attempt to reach one another so that they can be together and are both destroyed in the process.

This film was well made and the filmmaker did a great job of bringing a convincing life to their constructed characters. As with the short film Plastic Bag, they managed to craft a movie in which inanimate objects are anthropomorphized to the extent that the viewer is able to effectively read and understand what the characters are feeling and doing in each scene. On this level, I feel the filmmakers have succeeded. While watching, I felt like I understood what Sand Person and Snow Person were experiencing and feeling and I developed and attachment to them, hoping they would be together by the end. Unlike Plastic Bag, this film pulls it off without the use of dialogue, relying entirely on the character animations.

What I didn't like about this film was the overall sentiment that love is destructive and that everyone is doomed to be destroyed. I may be reading too much into it, but it seemed as if the filmmaker was attempting to convey that:

A: Two people who begin a relationship change one another, seen here as the objects being placed on the characters and becoming a part of them, humanizing them further.

and

B: That two people who begin a relationship will lose themselves completely in that relationship, effectively destroying themselves.

To me, the film seemed to be steeped a bit to heavily in the melancholy themes of "loves equals death" and "everything ultimately sucks" that seem to permeate the indie films scene these days. It looks great and the animations are well executed, however, I find the film lacking when taken as a whole.

Between Bears Short Film Review

Between Bears from Eran Hilleli on Vimeo.

OK so it's symbolic of man's attempt to rise up beyond his primitive nature and the inherent cyclical futility of his efforts? No, wait, I think it's about global warming. The bear at the beginning was hot so he shaved off his fur like Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite and the bear at the end is riding on the very last chunk of floating ice after the icecaps have melted. No?

Whatever the intended narrative of this film (assuming there even is one), it's sure to be secondary to graceful and strikingly original visual style and of this animated short. The oddly angular shapes and figures seem to drift around in a mostly bare and melancholy world where not much context is given. I especially enjoyed the simple parallax effect of the layers of trees panning as the butterflies drifted through the forest. It was haunting and very atmospheric.

The most human-like characters spend most of the running time of the movie trudging on and on across an ever changing landscape in chase of butterflies born from the shaved fur of the first bear. One is seen with a beard after the journey ends, suggesting that they wandered for a very long time. In the end, I was left with the same sort of somber feeling of having just seen something very serious and profound.

This was a beautiful and artfully executed short film and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Everything from the simple shapes of the onscreen elements to the subdued color pallet gives you a sense that this piece was very carefully crafted and the result is aesthetically pleasing and oddly touching at the same time. I'll be looking up more from this filmmaker.

Pivot Short Film Review

Pivot from Pivot on Vimeo.

I enjoyed this films so much that I watched it twice, back to back. This is a refreshingly stylish and original work of animation that has an intense, edge-of-your-seat tension and borderline surreal imagery to match. The angles are drastic and exaggerated and the camera seems to flow fluidly through the world and around the characters. This is the sort of innovative and visually interesting animation that I like to see!

The main character, a photographer, stumbles upon a murder and accidentally shoots photos of the crime as it happens. The murderer gives chase and a brisk action sequence takes them around town and ultimately to a showdown. They struggle and everything pivots; the hunted becomes the hunter and the photographer ends up chasing the murderer to an end that suggest that things have pivoted all the way around and have landed back where they started. This reversal is evident even in the choice of angles as the two characters first run left to right, one chasing the other. Then, after the tables have turned, they both run again, the other now chasing the first, from right to left. The two main characters are also reflected in one another's eyes both before and after the pivot in the plot.

All in all I found this to be a thoroughly engaging and exceedingly cool and well-made short film.

Plastic Bag Short Film Review

This was my second time seeing this film so I focused more on the visuals than the plot and gained a deeper appreciation of the totality of the piece. Aside from an evocative and emotional delivery of the environmental message (which I'm sure has been discussed to death already elsewhere); I'm intrigued by the way the director imbues the bag, basically a non-articulated puppet, with a real sort of breathing, moving life.

The bag drifts along gleefully (and sometimes sad and aimlessly) and the camera work follows. Movements become lighter and more fluid and the bag floats along, its handles sometimes flapping like wings. I find myself wondering how much of the bag's movement was staged specifically to reflect the script and how many lines were written after the fact to reflect a lucky gust of wind captured on camera that gave the bag a life of its own. I wonder if the bag was ad-libbing, as it were?

Aside from the voice of Werner Herzog, the director had to rely almost entirely on shot composition, lighting, and camera movement to convey the bag's thoughts, actions, and moods. There's something to be said for a filmmaker that gets a better performance out of an inanimate object than some directors can get out of a multi-million dollar major Hollywood star.