Within the world of animation, most experimentation occurs within short format productions, whether they are 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.

Niebla (Fog) (2006) 7:30, by Emilio Ramos (Mexico). Contact: Emilio Ramos, Coll del Portell 37, 1-2. 08024 Barcelona, Spain. [T] +34.9321.03791, +34.6387.25036 [E] zinedinemiliane@yahoo.com [W] www.emilioramos.com

Ark (2007) 8:00, by Grzegorz Jonkajtys (Poland). Contact: Marcin Kobylecki [F] 48.22.898.29.01 [E] mk@thearkfilm.com [W] www.thearkfilm.com

En Tus Brazos (2006) 5:20, by FX Goby, Matthieu Landour and Edouard Jouret (France). Contact: FX Goby [E] fxgoby@gmail.com, Matthieu Landour [E] matthieu_landour@hotmail.com, Edouard Jouret [E] edawan@hotmail.com [W] www.entusbrazos.fr

Close Your Eyes and Do Not Breathe (2006), 7:35, by Vuk Jevremovic (Germany, Serbia). Contact: Vuk Jevremovic, Canvas Productions [T] +491774011959, +3464821668 [E] vukje@yahoo.com

Loom (2006), 5:13, by Scott Kravitz (U.S.). Contact: Scott Kravitz [T] 15.282.4752 [E] scottkravitz@gmail.com [W] www.scottkravitz.com

Remembering days when flying sheep flocked in Niebla. © Emilio Ramos.

Niebla (Fog)
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, the setting is never quite certain (it takes place somewhere in rural Latin America) and the time is never quite named (although the story probably begins some time in the last 150 years, I guess) and some really weird things happen to a bunch of villagers (all of which they take in stride, stoically). That's magic realism -- you've got your magic and you've got your realism, and they're both roped together, and the characters are stuck with it all like a bad neighbor. If you haven't read Marquez' novel, and you should since it's both truly noble and one of the truly nuttiest shaggy dog stories of all time, one way to get in the mood is to watch the wonderful short Niebla (Fog) from Mexican animator Emilio Ramos.

The story is narrated by an old man referred to as El Pep, a wizened old man talking to a documentary film crew in the living room of his hovel. He digresses a bit, and there are too many juicy details to fit into a simple precis, but his story is about how his village was once overrun by flying sheep. The sheep descended one day out of a fog ("Don't trust a town that hides in the fog," he notes). The day they came the old man was but a boy washing windows, and suddenly there they were, hanging around the tops of the olive trees. Some bright young thing starts capturing them and tying them to strings like balloons. But economic concerns intrude. They capture the sheep; they shear them; they live off the proceeds. Things improve. They make cheese, which must be tied down. They make sweaters, and then swing down the scythe while they hover 10' above their crops. They toast their prosperity at a wild party, and a child in wooly jumpers floats helpless up on the ceiling.

But nothing lasts forever -- and the sheep eventually return to the sky, doing slow circles in the billowing fog as the young boy chases them with a butterfly net. "But all that happened before, long before you came here to listen to me," the man tells his interviewer, just to clarify that this is a story about the past. "Would you fancy a cup of coffee... ? Do you want me to prepare it? Or maybe you'd prefer to wait for Rosario? Hers is better, of course... Rosario?" Rosario doesn't appear. Perhaps she's shy. Or hiding.

Ramos actually didn't set out to ape the novelist Marquez when he thought up the story, but serendipity was with him. The impetus came from merging two strong emotional memories -- one was a real grandmother who ended her days in confusion as the people around her slipped away, while long-gone family and friends seemed to pass through her room. The other was a vivid nightmare of evil sheep swooping down from the sky. For all the way-out design you'll be popping your eyes at when you see the short, his stylistic approach is really extremely sensible, and animators in every medium would be well-pressed to follow suit: He's animated his backgrounds on 2D flats, while only the characters are 3D. As we learn the most from someone's face before we even glance at the body, so our sympathy for the world of an animated short or feature often starts not with the world but with the people in it.

The houses, yards, olive groves and billowing fog are all rendered as if scrawled upon the wind -- which they were, in a way, since animator Ramos knocked them all out by hand on a Wacom pad and then hung them magnificently in 3D space like so much abstract-expressionist laundry. The characters, meanwhile, from the old man to his imagined younger self to the coruscating avian sheep, are 3D creatures with just enough articulation to deliver the few subtle gestures that clue us to their states of mind. And unheralded oddities -- keys and spatulas hanging on a string in the man's kitchen, for example -- come and go like surrealist grace notes à la Buckaroo Banzai. ("Why is there a watermelon there?" "I'll tell you later.")

Ramos made the film as his masters project in animation at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, then formed his own production company so he could put four months' additional work into polishing it. Ramos already has a lot of advertising experience behind him, but clearly now his production shingle is available for more dramatic opportunities as well.