A mysterious package brings out the worse in two young men in Delivery. © 2003 Patrick Smith.

Delivery
Patrick Smith’s 2003 short Delivery neatly illustrated the keynote of every abusive relationship — he may be your tormentor, but you’ll miss him when he’s dead. In Smith’s traditionally animated film, the scenario begins with an anonymous deliveryman approaching a house with a package. Inside are two friends, or lovers, or brothers, one fair-haired and one dark-haired. They’re watching TV on the couch and sharing a bowl of popcorn when the doorbell rings. The fair-haired dude answers it (his friend refuses to budge), takes the package and cradles it curiously, but his buddy takes it away from him. When he tries to take it back his bud punches him with it repeatedly, spattering blood on the wall and knocking him to the floor.

The fair-haired fellow spends a brief interlude lying on the floor hallucinating that a platoon of his buddy’s clones are walking all over him, before he finally gets up to confront his friend. There’s more blood, and then the inevitable reveal of the box’s contents – which could have been too discursive; but Smith ties a tidy bow around the whole enterprise with a creepy and ambiguous final shot.

Like Don Hertzfeldt’s Billy’s Balloon, this is a wordless and darkly comic piece that turns no-action longueurs into the heartbeat of a diabolical comic timing, deftly rendering suspense out of the spaces between movements and expressions. Unlike Hertzfeldt, Smith has abuse issues he’s specifically working out through his animation, sparked by a relative who used to grab him by his face and throw him across the room (“He called it ‘The Craw’,” Smith says). Fortunately, Delivery doesn’t feel didactic — far from it; it’s universally appealing, due in equal parts to its formal perfection and its lack of dialogue.

Delivery was animated in pencil and scanned and colored in the computer; the results pulse between clean lines and funky crystalline structures as Smith emulates the xerographic look of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians and Jungle Book. The hypnotic music is by Karl vonKries, who also scored Smith’s harrowing mind-expansion trip Drink (2001). Smith was animation director for MTV’s Downtown and Daria series. Delivery is a product of his own New York studio Blend Films.

Aimee Mann sings and flies in Pavlov’s Bell. © Evan Mather.

Pavlov’s Bell
When I was eight I made up some amazing adventures with toy cars and Star Wars action figures, sitting in a tiny chair at the big red table in my upstairs bedroom. Evan Mather is one artist who has had the courage to remain at his childhood table; the through-line of his Mac-based movie output remains the world of little plastic toys.

Notorious to Star Wars fanboys for his curb-level lowbrow yet artful deconstructions of the George Lucas universe, the Tarantino universe and potty humor, Mather did a whole slew of stop-motion desktop animated films, beginning in 1997, starring his own collection of vintage Kenner action figures. If your inner eight-year-old isn’t tickled by the incessant fart jokes, your post-modern lobe will get a workout watching the “Miracle” gunfight sequence from Pulp Fiction re-enacted by Han Solo and Luke Skywalker dolls. (In a priceless bit of sampling from Star Wars, skeptical Han survives a close-range phaser blast from a stormtrooper only to quip, “I call it luck.”)

Mather’s drawn animations are more personal in their surrealism. In Fansom the Lizard (2000), a child dreams his pet lizard has gone to Vegas after his mother sucks it up with the vacuum cleaner. Action figures and Fisher-Price dolls figure heavily into Mather’s flat CGI character designs; elbows are frozen, arms swivel 360° at the shoulder, two slashes make the eyebrows above dotted eyes on noseless faces. Pavlov’s Bell, Mather’s music video for the Aimee Mann song of the same name, goes further with this design tack.

Pavlov’s Bell is the second video Mather has done for Mann, following Red Vines in 2001. If you see this new short on the big-screen, watch out; this turbulent air-travel-themed piece could give you motion sickness. Aimee’s on a plane to Idaho, in a pop-up paper landscape covered in the wheat fields and power lines of the great American Flyover. The scenario confirms what you suspected as a child — when the plane doors close, they lift you up, bounce you around and that’s it. Mather’s plane is land-locked above a field, accordioning on a length of folded cardboard, a metaphor that the viewer can fly anywhere. It’s a bracing and boldly-colored world brought to life by Mather’s innovate designs. (Most of Mather’s oeuvre, including Pavlov’s Bell and his many live-action shorts, can be viewed at the artist’s web site, www.evanmather.com.)

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. His piece on the production history of the animated feature Twice Upon a Time will appear in Animation Blast #9.