You’ve braved the rent increase and the unpleasant taxi driver, but you’ve NEVER faced the horror of — Frog! © Christopher Conforti.

Frog
Frog need water. Frog get wet! Frog happy. Really uptight humans at poolside unhappy. In Christopher Conforti’s screamingly funny animated short Frog, some men and women who haven’t learned to deal with the whole animal kingdom thing are confronted with a frog who just wants to get out of the baking sun and into something moist.

A spiteful and vindictive sun shines down on a plain green frog somewhere on the east coast, and the frog looks for relief. To his delight he spots a body of water that’s clear and inviting, and he rushes to dive into it. Zoom out to reveal this is a backyard pool, with two boys and two girls cavorting in the water. These characters are clearly refugees from some dense urban landscape and need to get out more often, because the mere sight of their new green amphibious friend causes them to scream uncontrollably, smack the poor frog with a chrome grill spatula and run indoors.

Frog is bursting with comic energy from practically the first frame, but froggy’s trip to the pool initiates a Book of Job of slapstick events so rapid-fire they could burn down all of upstate New York. The chain of events packed into the short’s four minutes moves from run-for-your-lives panic to frog-versus-technology violence to a breezily scatological finale that’s truly a showstopper.

Conforti animates traditionally in rough pencil sketches that he then scanned and colored digitally. His visual acting serves the comedy to the fullest, with exaggerated takes and subtle body language in equal amounts, but the voice work here is truly something else. You could experience this short blind or mute and get equal enjoyment out of it, so strong are both elements. The bullseye timing and rich dynamics of the voice team’s wordless vocalizations will put you on the floor. Besides the voice of the director, I feel obligated to name-check his three additional voice talents, Melissa Jordan, Marc Tatti and Garrett Koeppicus. I don’t know who’s doing which voice, but we’re sure to find out, because with this as their demo tape, they’ll have no end of credited industry work soon enough.

Do I have The Zit, or does the zit have me? © Mike Blum.

The Zit
If only acne functioned in real life as it does in The Zit. In this CG short, a young man is getting ready to go to the school dance, practicing propositions to a favored girl whose picture is stuck to the bedroom mirror. His pet cat plays the target of his affection, and when he’s got his courage sufficiently ratcheted up, kitty goes back to pawing at the birds in the branches just outside the window, and the boy gets ready for his night out. The boy takes a last sip on his soft drink — no more of which he needs, clearly, as he’s into plus sizes, pudgy, portly, a stout fellow, of goodly girth, definitely overweight.

One last peek in the mirror, and everything seems to check out, but as he tightens his belt one last time, the increased pressure inside his body cavity results in the protrusion of one pimple. The single red dot pops into view just beside his nose. This pin-sized point is barely visible, but he applies cream anyway. It goes away. A pencil-point-sized pimple appears nearby. He pushes it down without piercing it. An eraser-sized one pops up in its place.

In les than 30 seconds this blemish goes from zit to boil to a new body part. The poor boy’s skin becomes the game with the packing tape with the bubble in it that you push around and around but can’t eradicate, only this bubble’s blowing up like mushrooms in time-lapse photography. When it reaches the mass of a healthy cantaloupe the panicked boy finally decides violence is the answer, and grabs a fork to pierce the balloonish mass, which has by now already manifested itself as a variety of zoo animals protruding from various parts of his face. In goes the fork — and away it comes, the points splayed in various directions.

He can’t get relief, but he sees his cat still at the window pining after the birds outside. Quickly the boy dresses his zit like the biggest bird his cat’s ever seen, and tries to draw the kitty’s attention. The cat extends its claws and pounces. The result is a moist visual fireworks that leaves our hero transformed in a way that everyone addicted to acne-inspiring, fattening foods must wish they could do alone at home (if they could lay down plastic first).

Mike Blum is technical supervisor on Toy Story 3 (not a Disney/Pixar venture, this one, but strictly Disney/Disney — a great name for a casino, by the way). He and various members of his team created The Zit during production downtime with the same primo gear you’ll see bringing Chicken Little and A Day With Wilbur Robinson to the big screen in years to come. The character acting here is somewhat limited, and the computer animation does commit the cardinal sin of looking computery; but the incident is frenetic and the ideas inspiring, driving the viewer’s interest right through to the finale.