OIAF Shorts Round 4

As someone who can quite easily find feet a bit repulsive, Gina Kamentsky's Foot Print Shop wasn't my favorite thing to watch. A stop-motion film using lots of live action elements including, yes, human feet, this is a creative short that zips along with a soothingly industrial cadence, as you watch certain elements of the printing process happen again and again: a knob twisting, sheets of paper stacking on shelves, plates being moved. It's pretty calming.

Foot Print Shop

The big draw here is the audio, which is drawn from a conversation with Kamentsky's mom, Marcia, who recalls her daughter's pronated feet when she was a baby, and the way they had to be massaged to help them straighten out. In the grand tradition of mothers who are reminiscing, we also learn about Marcia's own feet, and her parent's feet, there's a mention of someone being a Pisces, and so on. It's a fun combination of imagery and sound, even for someone who doesn't love to look at feet. A nice little family time capsule.

You would expect a short that starts with a man murdering his wife to be about him dealing with the fallout of the murder. Maybe being on the run, hiding out, going to court, whatever. But that is not the case in John W. Lustig's off-kilter I Beg Your Pardon, in which the murderer is the only one who seems to care about what he's done. The cops who witness him dumping the body let him go. He goes to a bar where a news story reports the murder, and the bartender calls him a TV star. Even his in-laws don't seem shaken up about their daughter's fate.

I Beg Your Pardon

It's a suitably unsettling series of events, and one where you gradually get drawn into the absurdist tone and the nonchalance of every supporting character. I like when a film keeps you a little off-balance, not enough to totally throw you off, but enough to make you wonder what the hell is going on. That's the tricky tone Lustig manages to pull off here to compelling effect. I kept wondering if the other shoe would drop, if someone at some point would care, where this was all heading. I won't spoil it here, but it ends extremely strongly.

Weirdly, it almost feels like an exercise in escalation precisely because of the lack of escalation in the world around the protagonist. The change is purely happening in him as he spirals out and wonders why the world is reacting so blasé in the face of his actions. And we're right there with him. It's a dark, unsettling ride.

One of the most well-constructed shorts I've seen this year is Lucas Ansel's The 12-Inch Pianist, which grabs your attention right from its title. The film opens with a classic-feeling joke set-up. Guy walks into a bar where a 12-inch pianist tickles the ivories. Finds out there's a genie granting wishes in the bathroom. The rub? The genie has a hearing problem. The punchline, courtesy of the bartender: "You think I wished for a 12-inch pianist?" Ba-dum tss.

The 12-Inch Pianist

Where the short goes from there is brilliant. It becomes a deconstruction of the joke, reflecting on issues of identity, gender, and family. The script is sharp, has bite, and is so fucking funny. There's such a great flow to how this unfolds, even as it makes sharp turns. The overall thing ends up feeling like a well-told joke itself, complete with another smart capper of a punchline. It's one of those shorts you watch that has so much confidence, even swagger, you feel like you're in great hands. And you know it's well-deserved.

Of course, it also gets points in my book for being stop-motion, because hey, I like what I like. 

When I started watching Lilli Carré's Evacuations, I was a bit taken aback. I was wondering why this was programmed at an animation festival, or if it was going to be some kind of experimental short that pushes at the definition of animation, broadens it in some philosophical way that I would have to try to wrap my head around.

Ends up, that was not at all the case. The film starts with black and white photographs of various empty spaces: a school gymnasium, a hallway, a religious place of some sort. The presentation makes them feel liminal, though arguably none them are. They're just empty, faded, still. There are sounds effects that suggest life that maybe was there before or will be again, but sound is all there is.

Evacuations

For a little while, that is. After thirty seconds or so, the images start getting little animated flourishes, some extremely legible, others more expressionistic. The places repeat, but are given life: a roller coaster whooshes by on the previously empty tracks. various shoppers traipse through a shopping mall. A plethora of basketballs bounce around the gymnasium. It made me think of Richard Linklater's Before movies, where these places that once were mundane, even meaningless, suddenly have a pulse, a memory.

Evacuations takes the exercise even further, then showing us the added, animated elements sans their photographic settings. So, the film becomes an exercise in both addition and subtraction, in giving meaning and taking it away, in creation and destruction. It's a fascinating watch, and a weirdly thrilling one.