Rockfish redefines sports fishing. © Blur Studios.

Rockfish
Rockfish is a brisk and invigorating actioner that takes the concept of sports fishing literally out of this world. A large roving vehicle is tooling around on a distant planet with just a man and his pet on board. It rolls to a stop in a rocky desert terrain, and the driver releases his companion from a side compartment; out bounces what can only be described as the progeny of an unholy alliance between a golden retriever and Jar Jar Binks. It’s not fluffy, this quadruped, but it’s playful.

The man unfurls a complicated gravity-defying fishing chair akin to the diving cage from Jaws and drops a line down a deep, dark hole he’s just carved in the planet’s crust with a massive laser array. Then comes the waiting game, then the bite… followed by a rip-roaring joyride across the planet’s surface when the big one takes the bait and won’t let go.

The short film is a product of Southern California commercial animation house Blur Studios, and, like the studio’s 2002 short, Aunt Luisa, it’s pure pleasure. The eye wants to linger over every luscious detail: the retreating rings of red magma cooling to black inside the freshly-drilled fishing well, the giant moon on the horizon, the anarchic rock strata poking out of the endless landscape. The character animation is robust, and the naturalism of movement in particular is spot-on. In a film shorn of dialogue, you’ll swear you can hear this burly guy’s rhythms of speech just watching him grab some heavy equipment and swing it around.

The action is nicely balanced between laconic anticipation in the first half and nonstop action in the second. Just another photorealistic representation of an completely imagined fantasy world that would have been impossibly expensive, if not just impossible, to film only 15 years ago, and all done on a PC in Venice. Welcome to the digital realm, friends.