OIAF Shorts Round 2

In my review of Animation Mixtape, I mentioned how highly I (and many others) in the world of animation love Don Hertzfeldt. Vinson Chan ranks among those members, and how! His short, HECKIN' WEENS, ostensibly only exists to get the attention of Don Hertzfeldt. Per the opening script of the film, Vinson decided to throw this thing together when he sussed out that Hertzfeldt had a new film hitting the festival circuit in 2024 (that film, of course, being ME). Chan had been making looping animations of wieners (the sausage-type wieners, not the other type) for years without getting much attention, but now he planned to put them all together in a short in the hopes that he would bump into his hero at a festival.

HECKIN' WEENS

And that is exactly what HECKIN' WEENS is: a bunch of little animations of wieners, ranging from normal wiener behavior (getting cut up with a knife or roasted on a fire) to pop culture references (Spider-wiener, for example) to a few instances of twerking. Chan's art is clean and fun, the sort of broadly appealing but still specific enough style that feels like it should've gotten him some attention on the internet. It's cheeky, appealing, and there's a great variety. (It also feels pretty clearly inspired by Hertzfeldt's style, which checks out.)

Occasionally, the wiener action is punctuated with more titles about the journey, with increasingly silly innuendos about trying to get Hertzfeldt to look at Chan's wiener(s). All very fun.

I hope Hertzfeldt has seen this! At least within the film, we don't get confirmation that he has.

I got a few good laughs out of Renato Klieger Gennari's ICan't, which is available to watch on YouTube. It's a parody of a commercial for a robotic vacuum cleaner that starts innocuously enough before really going in for the comedic jugular, throwing in some well-placed profanity, taking a jab at AI, blurring the thing's "genitals" (or lack thereof). It's funny, short, and does exactly what it sets out to do. If you have a minute, check it out!

ICan't

Two Point Five Stars, from directors Sina Marie Lerf, Dario Marti, and Dario Boger, should come with a trigger warning for anyone who's ever worked a customer service job. It follows a woman working the front desk of a hostel, and all of the bits of chaos -- large and small -- that come with such a public-facing job. It's mostly the stuff you would expect: a lost TV remote, a coffee machine on the fritz, a customer demanding a room even though there are none left. But as the problems pile up, and the customers become more exasperated, every little problem intensifies and morphs into something more major, cartoonish, and impossible to handle.

Two Point Five Stars

The animation feels like margin doodles come to life, with lots of distorted perspectives and wild flights of fancy. It's scrappy, buzzy, fun to watch. And all the while, our poor protagonist just wants to finish her game of chess on the computer (which also provides the framework for the charmingly-presented end credits). It ends up customer service is a bit like chess, maybe. You have to be strategic in your approach, but sometimes, you're going to lose anyways.

Simon Hamlyn's Green Lung is a striking work, one that uses repeating graphic elements and powerful sound design to create a dichotomy between the industrial and natural worlds. It's an expressionistic work, told with silhouettes, shifting shapes, and even a backdrop of leaves as we leave the capitalist machinery behind to finally take a breath of fresh air. We see how backbreaking the factory work is, the physical toll of it, operating machinery and breathing in all sorts of things that likely shouldn't be breathed in.

Green Lung

And then, finally, there's the glorious freedom of the world outside: the green leaves, birdsong, no whirring cogs and booming looms. In a way, this film feels like the ultimate endorsement of "touching grass," so to speak. In a world that's so loud, oppressively loud, it's important to seek out the serenity of nature whenever you can.