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Keep it in Motion - Classic Animation Revisited: 'At The Quinte Hotel'

Every Thursday, Chris Robinson takes a look at films from animation’s past. This week screens Bruce Alcock's 2005 classic, At the Quinte Hotel.

At The Quinte Hotel (2005) is a dizzying mixed-media gem that uses a sundry of techniques to explore the repressive and contradictory shortcomings of masculinity, along with the clash between so-called high (beer, flowers, beauty) and low (bars, beer, fistfights) culture. A poet sits in a bar “drinking beer with yellow flowers in underground sunlight.” The bartender ignores the poet’s mumblings. Meanwhile, a fight breaks out and blocks the poet’s way to the toilet. He jumps one of the men and beats the shit out of him. While he sits on the pummeled little guy he tells him “Would you believe I write poems?” The poet then reads one of his poems to the bar crowd.  When he finishes the poem, the crowd cry and shake his hand. ”It was a heartwarming moment for literature,” says the poet. However, when the poet tries to get a free beer for his poetry reading, he’s refused. He sadly realizes that “it was brought home to me in the tavern that poems will not really buy beer or flowers or a goddamn thing.”

Alcock chose At The Quinte Hotel “because it's a poem about poetry in an unusual context, because it's visceral and casual, because it's patently Canadian. And I love mixing animation and poetry in general because both media are to a large extent solitary at the time of production, they're both obsessively worked out, detailed, exacting, yet at the same time expressive, loose, gestural and rhythmic. This poem was particularly well suited to the way I wanted to animate because it’s about the collision of beauty and ugliness, art and everyday life. I worked throughout at balancing beauty in the image with rawness, not over-aestheticizing the poem, and keeping the technique and look gestural, off-the-cuff like the language of the poem.” 

Chris Robinson's picture

A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.