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:

Flatlife (2004), 10:33, directed by Jonas Geirnart (Belgium). Contact: Nathalie Meyer, La Big Family 42, Rue Dethy1043, Brussels Belgium. [V] +32 2 538 31 58, [E] meyer@labigfamily.com [W] www.labigfamily.comnathalie

Snip (2004), 1:42, directed by Steven Woloshen (Canada). Contact Steven Woloshen, 5787 Rue Cartier, Montreal, Canada. H2g 2V1 [V] 514.270.3563 [E] swoloshen@hotmail.com

Piñata (2005), 4:08, directed by Mike Hollands (Australia). Contact Exec producer Thomas Schober, [V] +61 3 9510 8943, [F] 61 3 9510 8953, [E] Thomas@act3animation.com, [W] www.act3animation.com.

Bear Hunt (2005), 6:01, directed by Vance Reeser (U.S.). Contact Vance Reeser 104 S. Maxwell St., Siloam Springs, Arizona 72761, [V] (479) 524-0565, [E] vance@vanceresser.com, [W] vanceresser.com.

Everybody Else Has Had More Sex Than Me (2004), 4:00, directed by Bernard Derriman (Australia). Contact: Bernard Derriman [E] bernard@squetch.com, [W] www.squetch.com and www.arjandpoopy.com.

Sometimes you just have to make a short film with a panda as in Flatlife. © Jonas Geirnart.

Flatlife
Sometimes you just have to make an animated short. Other times you just have to make an animated short with a panda. Jonas Geirnaert is a 2004 graduate of the KASK Hogeschool, Gent, and his traditionally-animated short Flatlife was his senior thesis as well as a Jury Prize winner at Cannes, an accolade that must have gone well with the school tassel.

In a multi-story, high-density McBuilding in some grey cityscape live four anonymous apartment dwellers. There’s a conservatively-dressed balding business drone well into a second career as a painter; an old man in a red scarf passing the day with solitaire and TV; his wife, who’s down one floor in the laundry room; and a bulky guy with a goatee and a toolbox taking time off to knock back a cold one. The proscenium of the screen frames a cutaway view of their adjacent flats, split in quadrants, two to a floor.

As simultaneous actions continue in each corner, tiny dramas unfold, first in isolation and then in disastrous and hilarious tandem. The painter is marking time in his chosen idiom of endlessly repeated still lifes of a red vase. As he hammers a nail in the wall to hang his latest canvas, his burly neighbor bangs on the ceiling with a broom handle. The painting falls, the glass breaks and the artist goes downstairs to bang on the burly neighbor’s door — not to complain but to borrow a broom.

The washing machine downstairs suffers an unbalanced load and leaps about the room, which causes the burly guy’s furniture to dance from wall to wall. Then the pensioner’s TV upstairs and the burly guy’s TV downstairs get in a grudge match over a single cable stream they refuse to share. The panda documentary upstairs comes to life with a whack of the TV that causes the interstellar sci-fi epic on the tube downstairs to disappear.

Two whacks at once and the two shows unexpectedly merge into a vision of a panda rocketing through space. The action accelerates as the laundry cycle finishes and the old woman hangs up a double-sided comforter in front of the window to dry. One side has puffy cloud pattern - the sight of which causes a stream of birds outside to smack into the glass. She reverses it to show the starry-night pattern on the reverse instead. From nowhere a flying panda smacks the glass.

It’s a brilliant work of non-sequitur grace, and it should come as no surprise that animator Geirnaert is also part of a four-man improv comedy cabaret called Neveneffecten (Side Effects). One wonderful gag about a TV thrown from the window pays off in a laugh that’s 180 degrees away from expectations, and twice as funny for the effort.

Jonas has one other short in his C.V., a two-and-a-half minute political abecedary set to the tune of “God Bless America” called The All-American Alphabet, completed just in time for the run-up to Bush’s war (“A is for Army…”) Both are cartoony in style, and Flatlife was cel-animated and composited in TOONZ to achieve a comic-strip style of clean, thick lines and desaturated colors.

If, as his bio suggests, there’s exposure on Belgian TV in the works for him and his improv compatriots, it’ll be interesting to see if the actor-animator paradigm takes him along the infrequently assayed Terry Gilliam career path. If so, I can’t wait for his Brazil.