The Old Crocodile makes food of friends and family. © Yamamura Animation.

The Old Crocodile (Toshi Wo Totta Wani)
Also at Annecy this June is The Old Crocodile, the latest from Koji Yamamura, who brought us Animation Show fave Atama-Yama (Mt. Head) in 2002. His newest is based on a children's story by French author Leopold Chauveau, a contemporary of Rudyard Kipling.

A rheumatic old crocodile, old enough to remember days before the pyramids, is lounging on the banks of the Nile being an old fussbudget and doing annoying things like eating his great-grandchildren. When his family attempt to banish this arthritic senior from their midst, the ancient crocodile slips away into the river, humiliated, and makes for the Red Sea. Miles away he meets a friendly octopus whom he mistakes for a spider, and the crotchety old reptile gets along famously with the somewhat dotty sea creature (“Normally an octopus has eight legs, but I have 12,” he claims, though really he can only count as high as one).

The friendly octopus gets the crocodile tasty fish from the sea to eat, but at night the crocodile can't help himself so he helps himself — to his friend, eating one of her legs at a time until none are left. The octopus ends up stranded on a rock, baking in the sun and wondering why she can't feel her legs, as the crocodile ponders his conflicting motives of friendship and appetite. When, for better or worse, he resolves his dilemma and returns to the banks of the Nile, he's in for a surprise, as his retreating family members are replaced by advancing natives with worshipful poses and idolatry on their minds.

Leopold Chauveau still has a number of picture books in print in France, including La Poule et le Canard (The Hen and the Duck) and Petit Poisson Devenu Grand, and you may be able to track down a 1959 printing of his storybook Le Petit Cochon de Pain D'Épice (The Little Gingerbread Pig) on interlibrary load. Chauveau wrote and illustrated his sarcastic little fable about a crocodile in 1923, definitely an age of unpleasant racial caricatures, but Yamamura has done a good job of turning what might have been offensive cartoons of native Africans into simple iconic human forms that just happen to be the color of pitch.

Yamamura built his short traditionally, animating and then scanning his drawings for compositing. The background is a lazy shade of ivory that give his short the patina of the now-antique text it's based upon. It's all black ink drawings until we reach the Red Sea, and then red starts to sneak in, in a way that brightens the palette even as it comments on the characters. The acting and camerawork are up to Yamamura's usual fluid standard, and, at 13 minutes, it's much too short.

Ask the dust. Sheol © 2004 SHEOL by Rubén Möller WWW.RUE.CC PRODUCTIONS.

Sheol
Sheol is a very peaceful experience. On a rock outcropping with a pool and traces of plant and animal life — creeping ivy, slugs, ants — the sun beats down in a dappled pattern that seems to be coming from a variety of directions depending on where you look. Craning slowly over this accretion of red shale, some pebbles start to toddle around in the dust, and they gather together in one breathtaking instant to form the fingers of a human hand, which stretches and reaches up to scratch its head. The figure is in the shape of a man, its frame built of ellipsoid and triangular rocks that suggest musculature but don't quite touch.

Over Sheol's 10 minutes, which open and close with a quiet baroque chamber piece but unfold in near silence punctuated by water drops and wind, the figure stretches out in its surroundings, allowing an ant to navigate the back of its hand, watching a slug move to and fro. Meanwhile the ivy is dancing very slowly in the shifting light as its time scale passes by in a flash, creating a sensation of breathless speed even as the central character radiates the stillness of wakeful meditation.

The feeling of grace that washes over this piece comes more than anything from its deliberate imperfection. There's a fuzziness reminiscent of early computer-generated films of the 1980s, the kind that have only survived on grainy film prints; at the same time its convincingly lifelike movements and textures bespeak complex computer modeling and serious render times. What's amazing is that this is only partly CG: the footage of twitching ivy creepers looks like time-lapse photography because it is. Animator Rubén Möller could have gone completely virtual but chose to incorporate CGI models into his own hand-crafted nature set, filled with real plant life and kept alive over nine years thanks to artificial lights.

It’s a bold move, suggesting either a grand obsession or a simple love of process. Whether it's a meditation or a myopic exercise in technique for technique's sake, it's exquisite to watch. In Hebrew, sheol means cave, and in metaphysical terms also refers to a hollow underground where spirits abide. It's the latter meaning that Möller says he intended to evoke, but in its open-endedness, his short film invites viewers simply to exist in its presence, free to imbue it with meaning or leave it alone in a qualification-free state of Thisness like a Japanese rock garden.