Within the world of animation, most experimentation occurs within short format productions, whether they be high-budgeted commercials, low-budgeted independent shorts or something in between. The growing number of short film festivals around the world attest to the vitality of these works, but there are few other venues for exhibition of them or even written reviews. As a result, distribution tends to be difficult and irregular. On a regular basis, Animation World Magazine will highlight some of the most interesting with short, descriptive overviews.

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from each film by simply clicking the image.

This Month:

Beak (Bek) (2004), 12:00, directed by Lucette Braune (the Netherlands). Contact: il Luster Productions, Herenweg 45, 3513 CB, Utrecht, the Netherlands. [T/F] +31 (0) 30 24 007 68 [E] distribution@illuster.nl [W] www.illuster.nl

Frank and Wendy (Frank ja Wendy) (2004), Serial: seven episodes x 9:10; TV special 75:21, directed by David Snowman (aka Pritt Pärn, Priit Tender, Kaspar Jancis and Ylo Pikkov) (Estonia). Contact Eesti Joonisfilm [E] info@joonisfilm.ee [W] www.joonisfilm.ee

Frog (2004), 3:54, directed by Christopher Conforti (U.S.). Contact Christopher Conforti [T] (561) 596-0914 [E] cecon40@aol.com

Portrait of D (Retrato de D) (2004), 8:21, directed by María Lorenzo (Spain). Contact: María Lorenzo Hernández, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Department dibujo, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022 Valencia, Spain. [T] +34 96 387 74 63 [F] +34 96 387 74 69 [E] mlorenzo@dib.upv.es

The Zit (2005), 4:45, directed by Mike Blum (U.S.). Contact: Mike Blum, Pipsqueak Films [T] (818) 997-0787 [E] info@thezitmovie.com [W] www.thezitmovie.com, www.pipsqueakfilms.com

A painter trades his daytime life for youth and fame as he paints the Portrait of D. © María Lorenzo.

Portrait of D (Retrato de D)
Portrait of D is a vampire story less obsessed with sharpened canines and sudden lunges for the throat than with the more Borgesian conceits of mirrors, portraits and portraits as mirrors. It’s a short story with a three-act arc that nevertheless has been crunched nicely into a fast-moving 10 minutes using the kind of animation-only associative transitions of which Georges Schwizgebel is so fond, which D director Maria Lorenzo acknowledges as a primary influence.

In London at the end of the 19th century a society painter at a grand ball meets a tall, dark stranger from overseas. D, for this is the stranger’s name, convinces the painter to do his portrait. D is a fan of cabaret and other after-dark entertainment and never ventures out during the day, so every evening after 7:00 pm the two men meet in the painter’s studio for the preliminary sketches. Oddly, the painter wakes every morning to see his sketches of the night before reduced to wriggles of abstract blue strokes.

The painter decides to go ahead with his final oil portrait from memory, but when he steps back the figure on the canvas blurs. Nightmares follow, full of breaking mirrors and blood oozing from his canvas. Implicitly — and later explicitly — it comes about that the painter and D are having more than a professional relationship, and the painter starts to be seen about town in red-tinted glasses. (What he sees behind the shades is one of the aesthetic highlights of the short, with street-wandering glitterati shape-shifting into fanged predators and a zoom-in on a courtesan’s full breasts becoming a pair of staring eyes, as dogs bark and a cabaret band plays backwards.)

Eventually the painter abandons D, whose olive-green skin and pointed fingernails protrude from under the bathrobe but whose face remains an undifferentiated oval under his hair. Time goes by and at last the painter unveils his masterwork, the portrait of D that all of society considered unpaintable. As the curtain comes up, a gasp goes around the room as smoke pours from a hole in the canvas where the face should have been. The silence turns to polite applause, which builds to a rapture. He’s invented modernism, they cry — confronted with the unpaintable visage of another, he’s put himself on the canvas instead. The painter can’t believe it, but he rushes to a mirror and his fears are confirmed; there’s nothing to see but the back of his own head.

Portrait of D was animated traditionally, using acrylics in thick strokes that again are reminiscent of the works of Schwizgebel, although Lorenzo gets more life in her characters’ faces than the abstraction-minded creator of L’Homme Sans Ombre. The color palette is fairly straightforward, full of earth tones, favoring reds and generally eschewing saturated hues. The teleportive scenic transitions from one location to another by means of a shared character or prop are particularly elegant. Portrait of D was a featured short at this year’s Annecy Festival.