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Fresh from the Festivals: May 2002's Film Reviews

Jon Hofferman reviews five short films fresh from the festival circuit: Black Soul/Ame Noire by Martine Chartrand, Ian Freedman's Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance, A Hunting Lesson/Une Len de Chasse by pinscreen master Jacques Drouin, The Journal of Edwin Carp by Richard Bazley and Emily Hubley's Pigeon Within. Includes QuickTime movie clips!

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from each film by simply clicking the image.

This Month:

Black Soul/Ame Noire (2001), 9.75 min., directed by Martine Chartrand, Canada. Info: Julie Roy, National Film Board of Canada, 3155 Côte de Liesse, Ville St-Laurent, Québec, H4N 2N4, Canada. Tel: 514-283-3472. Fax: 514-283-4443. Email: jroy@nfb.ca.

Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance (2001), 4 min., directed by Ian Freedman, Canada. Info: Roula Lainas, Lost Boys Studios, 395 Railway St., 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC, V6A 1A6 Canada. Tel: 604-738-1805. Fax: 604-738-1806. Email: roula@lostboys-studios.com.

A Hunting Lesson/Une Leçon de Chasse (2001), 13 min., directed by Jacques Drouin, Canada. Info: Julie Roy, National Film Board of Canada, 3155 Côte de Liesse, Ville St-Laurent, Québec, H4N 2N4, Canada. Tel: 514-283-3472. Fax: 514-283-4443. Email: jroy@nfb.ca.

The Journal of Edwin Carp (2001), 7 min., directed by Richard Bazley, USA/UK. Info: Richard Bazley, Bazley Films, Corsham Media Park, Spring Quarry, West Wells Road, Corsham, Wiltshire, SN13 9GB, U.K. Tel: 122-581-6210. Fax: 122-581-6211. Email: richard@bazleyfilms.com.

Pigeon Within (2000), 4.5 min., directed by Emily Hubley, USA. Info: Emily Hubley, Hubbub Inc., 11 Buckingham Gardens, Maplewood, NJ 07040. Tel: 973-763-6076. Email: hubbubinc@earthlink.net.

hofferman01.jpgBlack Soul/Ame Noire. © 2001, National Film Board of Canada.

Black Soul

Condensing several hundred years of Black history into a brief ten minutes, Black Soul is an impressionistic, often beautiful, and somewhat fragmented evocation of the African-American and African-Canadian experience. Using oil paint on glass and the framing device of an elderly woman instructing her grandson, director Martine Chartrand presents a whirlwind tour that incorporates images of African ancestry, the iniquities of slavery and discrimination, and a celebration of creativity. The director exploits her fluid medium to create a pleasingly flowing tableau, but her transitions sometimes feel forced and the whole suffers from a diffuseness that detracts from the film's impact. There are a lot of good ideas here -- visual, thematic and musical (the wonderful score includes jazz, gospel music and African rhythms) -- and the effect is frequently both moving and aesthetically pleasing; at the same time, one feels that Chartrand tried to fit too much into too small a space.

Martine Chartrand worked as an illustrator and teacher before becoming involved with animation in 1986 as a layout and color artist. In 1992, she directed her first film, Tango, which garnered several international awards. She received a grant in 1994 to study with Alexander Petrov in Russia, where she helped develop his The Old Man and the Sea and made Black Soul. Black Soul has screened at more than sixty festivals, including Annecy, Toronto, Zagreb, and Cinanima, and has won numerous awards.

hofferman02.jpgFrank Was A Monster Who Wanted To Dance. © 2001, Lost Boys Studios.

Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance

This visually imaginative computer animation gets a lot of mileage out of its exceedingly simple story, which is told in rhyme. Based on an illustrated children's book by Keith Graves, the film to some extent outweighs its modest source material, but it's fun to watch, thanks to careful comic timing and a wealth of amusing detail. Director Ian Freedman makes some strange choices, such as giving the monster a hillbilly accent. Plus, it would be nice if there were a little more of a narrative payoff. But for what it is, the film works well and has a lot of flair.

Since graduating from Sheridan College's Classical Animation program in 1980, director Ian Freedman has worked on over fifty animated TV series, as well as educational films, features and digital games. He opened his own company in 1987 and, in 1996, co-founded Barking Bullfrog Cartoon Company. Director of animation Ken Meyer was hired fresh out of Vancouver Film School by Lost Boys Studios, where he now serves as animation director and senior 3D artist. His other work includes commercials, digital games and special effects.

Frank was named Best Animated Short at the Northwest International Film Festival and was awarded a Silver Medal at the New York Festival of Film and Video.

hofferman03.jpgA Hunting Lesson. © 2001, National Film Board of Canada.

A Hunting Lesson

A somewhat confused moral tale ostensibly about the evils of hunting, A Hunting Lesson features pinscreen animation by Jacques Drouin, an acknowledged master of this rarefied technique. It seems an odd, or in any case arbitrary, choice to use this type of animation for a straightforward narrative, since the particular qualities of pinscreen animation are generally better suited to more abstract subject matter (e.g., Drouin's 1976 masterpiece, Mindscape). Still, while the visuals in A Hunting Lesson tend to be static, many of the tableaux -- which are lit in various colors -- are quite beautiful, and Drouin is frequently successful in transcending the inherent limitations of the form. Dramatically, however, the film is less successful. The story, based on a book by Jacques Godbout, comes across as vague and unfocused, and the intended lesson about having reverence for life isn't clearly motivated by the specifics of the events depicted.

Jacques Drouin joined the National Film Board as an apprentice in 1973 and developed a fascination for the Alexeieff-Parker pinscreen, which the NFB had acquired the previous year. In addition to Mindscape, his other films in this medium include Trois exercices sur l'écran d'épingles d'Alexeieff (1974); and, among others, the puppet/pinscreen hybrid Nightangel/L'Heure des anges (1986), made in collaboration with Czech animator Bretislav Pojar; and Ex-Child/Ex-enfant (1994). He is currently conducting research with a view to combining pinscreen with computer animation.

A Hunting Lesson was shown at Annecy, Leipzig, Stuttgart and several other festivals and received the Jury Prize at the New York Expo of Short Film and Video.

hofferman04.jpgThe Journal of Edwin Carp. © 2001, Richard Bazley.

The Journal of Edwin Carp

Set to the strains of an early Beethoven quartet, this droll shaggy dog story relates the unfortunate series of misadventures that befalls the title character when he attempts to rectify a small plumbing problem. Based on the book of the same name by Richard Haydn, with illustrations by the renowned British illustrator, Ronald Searle -- whose style inspired the film's design, The Journal of Edwin Carp was created using Flash and After Effects, which is somewhat remarkable considering its hand-drawn look. The loose drawing style and purposefully understated narration is punctuated by a small number of judicious camera moves and oddly shifting perspectives, all of which serves to convey the story's dry humor and whimsical outlook in a most efficacious manner.

Director Richard Bazley has worked for the past decade as a supervising animator for three of the major animation studios, Sullivan Bluth, Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Best known for his supervisory work on The Iron Giant, he was a lead animator on Disney's Hercules and has contributed to Pocahontas, Osmosis Jones and many other animated features. The Journal of Edwin Carp, which is Bazley's directorial debut, received some financial support from Macromedia and Wacom, but was largely self-funded. It has been shown at the Teeside Animation Festival in the U.K. and a number of other venues.

hofferman05.jpgPigeon Within. © 2000, Hubbub, Inc.

Pigeon Within

Director Emily Hubley offers another in a series of highly personal and rather recondite short films, which, though text-based and identifiably narratives, communicate more through suggestion than actual exposition, and appear to serve a therapeutic function as much as an artistic one. Pigeon Within follows a confused and unhappy girl through the subways and streets of New York, charting her encounters with a couple of ambiguous figures and dipping into her internal monologue. Hubley's distinctive visual style, which features rudimentary hand-drawn characters combined with xeroxed photos in a rough collage, is well-suited to her oblique, dream-like narrative. (Hubley notes that the inspiration for Pigeon Within was in fact a dream.) It's problematic, however, whether this disjunctive world ultimately is too insular to allow much meaning to seep through.

Emily Hubley began her animation career in the studio of her parents, John and Faith Hubley, in 1977, and has been making her own films since 1980. Among her many award-winning works are Delivery Man (1982), Blake Ball (1988), Enough (1993), Her Grandmother's Gift (1995), The Girl w/Her Head Coming Off (three segments, 1996), and One Self: Fish/Girl (1997). She also served as the animator for the feature film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). Pigeon Within received major awards at the New York Animated Film Festival and the USA Short Film Festival, and was screened at Anima Mundi, Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art, among other venues.

Jon Hofferman is an independent filmmaker, writer and graphic designer, as well as the creator of the Classical Composers Poster (www.carissimi.com). He has a B.A. in Philosophy & Religion and an M.F.A. from UCLA's School of Film & Television. Appropriately enough, he is currently working on a documentary about the nature of religious experience.

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Jon Hofferman is a freelance writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of the Classical Composers Poster, an educational and decorative music timeline chart that makes a wonderful gift.