Vessel Wrestling. © Lisa Yu.

Vessel Wrestling
And then there's Vessel Wrestling, from the other side of the planet in oh-so-many ways. During much of the time I spent watching this twelve-minute film, my mouth was slightly ajar and my eyes were fixed to the screen. Lisa Yu's thesis film from the University of California, Los Angeles is not your average clay animation.

Beautifully art-directed and shot throughout, the film begins with images of scratching on clay that is combined with sounds of squishy mud and something else that falls somewhere between a roar of a beast and the moo of a very unhappy cow. The overall suggestion is that there is a raging creature lurking somewhere, trying to emerge. These images and sounds are intercut with animation of a nude sensuously-designed woman waiting for an unknown person to come to eat the food she has served, calling out, "Yoo-hoo," and peering around in an ambiguous way. Problems start when a hairball in the corner of the kitchen begins to grow. And grow. And grow. And then there's the sex -- and plenty of it -- with a nude man who eventually shows up in the kitchen.

Lisa Yu describes the film as "a primordial passion play at supper time," which can be synopsized as: "A woman serves dinner. She waits. Stuff happens." And as it does, Yu demonstrates her indebtedness to Jan Svankmajer, whom she describes as a major influence. Indeed, it is hard not to think of Svankmajer's work when one sees her clay bodies metamorphosing into each other and shifting between liquid and solid states, along with individual strands of animated hair gyrating strangely before our eyes and real beans and jello glistening on the screen. However, Yu shows that she is a powerful artist in her own right. She controlled all aspects of the film, including story, production design, animation, cinematography and sound (voice was provided by Yuki Terazawa). Vessel Wrestling has garnered the Best Experimental Short at Slamdance, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at Ann Arbor, and numerous other awards and screenings world-wide. The film is dedicated in part to her parents. All I can say about that is, "Wow."

Bee Movie. © Gil Kenan.

Bee Movie
The University of California, Los Angeles has a tradition of holding weekend-long marathons, where students close themselves in a room, essentially, and at the end emerge with an animated film. UCLA student Gil Kenan did the same thing, though working solo on his home computer, to create Bee Movie. In this 2-minute work, Kenan uses original artwork, found newsreel (of demonstrations and other 1950s/1960s style images), and nature documentary to create a metaphor for the plight of immigrants. Creatures composed of bee heads 'pasted' onto human bodies tell of the inequities they face as they have difficulty assimilating into their new culture, being constantly driven to create more honey.

Spanish animator J.J. Martinez provides the heavily accented voice of the bee, reminding me somewhat of the famous Brazilian big cat in Nick Park's film, Creature Comforts. Although Kenan is enrolled in the MFA Animation program, Bee Movie was created for a critical studies course. This film provides an interesting example of what can be accomplished in a short time with such readily-available tools as a home computer, Adobe After Effects, and Strata Studio Pro, which Kenan describes as "beautifully primitive."