Shh. doesn't placate a crying baby. © Adam Robb.

Shh.
A somewhat uneasy cross between Chuck Jones and Jean-Luc Godard, Adam Robb's Shh. uses classical animation to depict the increasingly frantic efforts of a harried animator (i.e., Robb) to placate a crying baby. Robb's a terrific draftsman and it's a pretty funny idea; in particular, he uses the old and perennially appealing technique of showing the animator's hand drawing in fast motion, as he devises one potential pacifier after another for his unruly creation. Once he gets inside (both literally and figuratively) the baby's head, though, the results are rather less successful. Robb clearly has more on his mind than simple slapstick, but his attempt to present a kind of social critique through a series of word transformations with accompanying illustrations, while suggestive and admirably ambitious, is more confusing than illuminating. The problem is due at least in part to his mixing of categories and conceptual frames, which tends to obscure his analysis, and his rather odd decision to purposely misspell many of the words, which further obscures his intentions.

Adam Robb attended the VCA School of Film and TV in Australia, where he made Shh. as part of his postgraduate work. The film has screened at Annecy, the Melbourne International and International Animated Film Festivals, the KROK Festival, and many others. Robb's self-described goal in creating animation that combines "the political, the personal and the bizarre" is "to make audiences think."

The filmmaker takes on Skin shedding in this short. © Bobby de Groot.

Skin
More an exercise than a fully realized film, this stop-motion work by Bobby de Groot is highly atmospheric and well executed, but it suffers from the absence of a storyline or any sense of implied meaning beyond the depicted events. As the filmmaker summarizes the plot: "Locked in a prison, [a] prisoner is forced to shed his skin." This is pretty much what happens, with the protagonist reduced at the end to a skeletal armature. However the motivation for and consequences of this self-flaying (which, given the stylized nature of the character, isn't especially unpleasant), are not in any way apparent. De Groot cites Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, among others, as influences, and the filmmaker does a good job of emulating the surreal and rather insular tone of their work. However, lacking any kind of narrative development, the film is at best an indication of de Groot's potential and of perhaps better things to come.

A graduate of the School of the Arts in Utrecht, for which Skin was a second-year project, Bobby de Groot has worked in various capacities in the Dutch animation world for the past four years. Skin was shown at Annecy in 2002 as part of the student competition and was also selected for the Golden Flame Video Festival, the Cartoon Network Golden Cow Festival, and the Holland Animation Film Festival.

Jon Hofferman is an independent filmmaker, writer and graphic designer. He is also the creator of the Classical Composers Poster (a unique work of art that makes a wonderful gift for anyone interested in or learning about classical music, available at www.carissimi.com) and a shameless promoter.