OIAF Shorts Round 3

As someone who watches a lot of animated stuff, including a lot that's ostensibly made for children, I have a proclivity toward, or at least a soft spot for, so-called "potty humor." Maybe it's my Midwest roots, but a well-timed fart will always have me in stitches, and a poop joke is among my most revered kinds of humor.

Which means I am the actual ideal audience member for Tomek Ducki's wonderfully weird Birds of Paradise, which is a charming little odyssey literally (not literally) built on poop. In it, a cast of adorable birds of various shapes and sizes use their poop to make an island, and thus, a community. Their poops are gray and bland, but they do the job of building a decently-sized island where they can commune and, yes, poop some more.

Birds of Paradise

One day, a red polka-dotted boot washes up onshore, a shocking bit of color in a fairly colorless world. The boot opens up a world of possibilities, giving the birds abilities to poop in various rainbow-colored configurations, but also perhaps posing a threat to their very existence. Is it a false god? A mechanism for evolution? A parasite? Maybe it's all of the above.

What it definitely is, is a great comedic engine for a thoroughly charming short. I love the birds' personalities and movements, the way one's beak reaches up and over its eyes to form a makeshift hand as it peers into the distance, the way the group dances in worship around the boot. Every moment of Birds of Paradise is a bizarre little delight, right up to the silly-surprising finale. Can't recommend this one enough!

This next short also involves bird poop, though it's much more incidental, and more normal avian bowel movement.

Annechien Strouven's Le tunnel de la nuit (The Night Tunnel) is a whimsical little adventure about finding connections and friendship in a world that can often be a little lonely. When I was a kid, we always wondered if we could dig a hole deep enough to make it to China, which was the furthest-away place we could imagine (I feel like this was some sort of pop-culture idea planted in all our heads, or maybe not). In Strouven's lovely short, this is kind of what happens.

Le tunnel de la nuit

A boy and his dog are on the beach, looking for someone to play with, but there are no takers. So, the paddles that ought to be hitting a ball back and forth are instead put to use as tiny shovels, which strike a magical tunnel which takes the boy to (I think) Africa, where he ends up on a beach where a girl is playing with her pet giraffe. Together, they strike another tunnel which takes them so a snow beach (if that's a thing), where another girl is playing with a walrus. These kids, who are on their own save their animal companions, suddenly find themselves connecting with each other, finding fun and friendship in these far-flung corners of the world. It's a super sweet conceit.

And what really makes this sing is how brilliant the presentation is. This film is drenched in shades of blue and orange, making for a lot of gorgeous compositions and strikingly different settings. The characters are cute in their designs, and I love the pulsing of the magic whirlpool-esque tunnels, which match perfectly with the upbeat, percussive score.

It's really fun hopping between these places, with these characters, and it did make me want a pet giraffe. It kind of steals the show, to be honest.

When I was looking over the list of shorts, one that caught my eye was Sosuke the Duck (directed by bekky O'Neill). "That's a cute title," I thought. "I bet this'll be a sweet little thing."

Sosuke the Duck

Oh, how naive I was.

I was not prepared for the absolute emotional tour-de-force that was to come. Although that probably isn't the right way to describe it. There's nothing forceful about the story of a little duckling with a bad leg, and the special care and love that he's given to help him seize the most of every moment. The short is an exercise in gentleness, from the expressive plant-based ink animation to the soft cadence of O'Neil's animation. It feels like a warm embrace, one that's telling you that things are going to be okay, even when they very much aren't.

"All life needs love," the film tells us, and sure enough, this is a story of huge, generous hearts pouring love into a creature that, without that outpouring, wouldn't have lived very long at all. What a precious thing to get to hear the story of a life, even one as short as Sosuke's, especially when the story is written in love. It's a reminder to always show care, to give what you can, and to appreciate every moment. 

This is one of those shorts that I will never forget.