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:

Moo(n) (2003), 3:25 directed by Leigh Hodgkinson (UK). Contact: Richard Barnett, Slinky Pictures, The Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. [T] +20.7247.6444 [F] +20.7247.0164 [W] www.slinkypics.com

Man Without a Shadow (L’homme sans ombre) (2004), 9:35, directed by Georges Schwizgebel (Switzerland). Contact: Contact: Christine Noel, NFB [E] c.noel@onf.ca

The Birthday (Syntymäpäivä) (2004), 15:00, directed by Kari Juusonen (Finland). Contact: Kinoproduction Oy, Leila Lyytikäinen, Pasilan vanhat veturitallit, 00520 Helsinki Finland. [T] +358.9.6850.460 [F] +358.9.6850.4610 [E] kino@kinoproduction.fi [W] www.kinoproduction.fi

Handshake (2004), 4:40, directed by Patrick Smith (U.S.). Contact: Patrick Smith, Blend Films, [T] 212.406.1631 [E] pat@blendfilms.com [W] www.blend films.com

Through My Thick Glasses (À travers mes grosses lunettes) (2003), 12:41, directed by Pjotr Sapegin (Norway). Contact: Christine Noel, NFB [E] c.noel@onf.ca

The little girl laughed to see such fun — but not for long — in Moo(n). © Slinky Pictures.

Moo(n)
Moo(n) takes as its text the classic rhyming narrative about the cow, the jump and the lunar circumnavigation. Not all of the classic rhyming narrative, mind you, just part of it. As the modern reader quotes certain Biblical verses to justify one thing and another, but conveniently ignores the bit about No Shellfish, so has animator Leigh Hodgkinson amusingly glommed on to the more true-to-life aspects of a certain nursery rhyme while skipping others. To which I say, oh yes, it’s all fine and good to dramatize a cow jumping over the moon when it’s part of our everyday reality, but whither the cat? Whither the fiddle? Whither the fork and spoon? Where, in short, is the accountability?

Sorry... Moo(n) is an animated short about a little girl, a cow, a wretched bee and a rhinovirus, and it’s the kind of nuttiness that drives children gaga. On a very small planet lives a girl and her cow. They are inseparable until the day the girl catches cold, whereupon her parents sequester her in her room. The cow tries to cheer her up by jumping over the moon, one of many small local planetary bodies and stars. But the cow’s arc takes it only far enough to plough into the moon’s surface, and there it stays, marooned.

On the same moon is a very loud and cranky bumblebee, its stinger stuck fast in the lunar surface. It’s actually the cow’s fault that the bee is there, the cow having swatted it fiercely in irritation at the story’s beginning and launched it into orbit. (This is a really small solar system.) The bee can’t accept his fate, stuck forever with his tormentor, so he insists the cow eat all the neighboring moons and asteroids and let the force of gravity draw his enormous bulk back to the surface of their home world.

Leigh Hodgkinson, a director with the Slinky Films animation collective, animated Moo(n) digitally as a three-dimensional universe made entirely from staggered planes of 2D action — the wet-dream multiplane array that Walt Disney never got. In one of the short’s best animated meta-gags, the camera actually does a 180 as it moves through one virtual glass plane after another, letting us see the back of the cow in the reverse P.O.V. we never got in Pinocchio. (Sadly, the cow’s reverse holds no secrets — it’s only a flip of the obverse.)

Apart from the funky textures and goofy cutout-style character poses, the tastiest treat is the lighting. All the world seems lit single-source by a 40-watt bulb just behind the camera. Characters and set dressing throw enormous shadows in a flickering light that vignettes at the edges of the frame like a pay telescope.

The color scheme is a palette of bleached-to-nothing earth tones, as close to black-and-white as possible without being monochromatic. In subject and tone, it evokes the King of the Moon sequence from Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and the voices are appropriately comic. Bumblebee Matt Lucas is a ubiquitous presence on British TV whom you may have spotted as Cousin Tom in Shaun of the Dead, and narrator Robert Llewellyn is best known as the put-upon Mechanoid hero Kryten in Red Dwarf.

Moo(n) is the latest product of Channel 4’s Artist in Residence scheme with the Museum of the Moving Image, and Hodgkinson practiced her art in public in a glass box on London’s South Bank under the watchful eye of holidaymakers and cranky schoolchildren (which may or may not have influenced her choice of subject matter).