Fresh from the Festivals: June 2007's Reviews
Close Your Eyes and Do Not Breathe Close Your Eyes and Do Not Breathe is an animated short inspired by a novel, which is already a dicey proposition before you even get to the content. "Inspired by" is uncomfortably close to "Based on," and we all know how hard it is to cram the essence of a good novel into a movie, let alone a short (an artist is almost better off expanding a short story into a feature). Taking inspiration instead offers a lot more slack, but it really only leaves room for an impressionistic voyage.
Close Your Eyes does that -- and it tries to inject drama too, which is a problem, because the characters have no visible personalities. Still it's stylistically very beautiful, with computer-manipulated traditional character drawings and backgrounds, a nice use of the Cinemascope proscenium, a willingness to mix regular line drawings and areas with inverted values, and a simple score for acoustic and electric guitar.
Close Your Eyes and Do Not Breathe is about a nocturnal journey into someone else's life. A city man is sitting in front of his computer late one evening when a wisp arrives at his window; it's a horse, and it's a woman, and one becomes the other in the blink of an eye. She addresses the man, giving the instruction from which the short takes its title, and with his breath held he grabs on and they burst out the window. They soar over the city; they pause over an unknown sea battle; they linger in palatial home from a century ago and he watches a simple domestic scene. They hover in the early morning sky and kiss; and finally the sun rises and the vision crumples into the middle of the screen and disappears.
Loom Outside we spot the cellist on the sidewalk; it's a young man with a goatee playing for spare change. A little girl stares at the busker while her father stands reading a newspaper. She tugs at his sleeve; he gives her a single coin. She walks over to drop it in the can, but it hits the edge and bounces and rolls. The little girl follows. The coin goes out into the street. The cellist is distracted somewhat by the sight of the old lady being pushed in her wheelchair across the street, but with a start he notices the girl and, in a flash, he drops the cello, rushes into the street, and pushes her out of the way of an approaching truck. She's lucky. He isn't.
He's still gasping hard for breath when the lady in the wheelchair appears in front of him with a little spindle that she produces from her bag, holds in the air above his head, and lets go. It hovers, it spins, and in a few magic seconds it starts to spool up a golden thread that's emanating from the dying cellist's head. Just a few feet is all she needs; then she takes the scissors and snips it in mid-air. The man falls still and deathly silent. The woman pockets the spool and is wheeled back to her apartment -- where, feeding her newly found thread into the loom, she gets back to work.
Stop-motion animators necessarily live in a professional world where personal craft duets with the client's vision, whether they're making commercials or giving life to tiny fractions of scenes in TV shows or features. Loom is Kravitz' chance to put himself back on both sides of the creative divide, and his dramaturgy and tradecraft are both superb. Dude's got mad skills, first of all; the characters' body movements are so startlingly true-to-life that I spend my first viewing distracted by the thought that these might be real people with stop-motion heads and clothes grafted on in post.
The dying character has a red face (with a striking resemblance to Trainspotting's Ewen Bremner); the death angel is blue-skinned; the child is sunflower yellow. As their urban surroundings vary in hue, so do the characters; it's organic and surrealist all at once. Kravitz's acknowledgements list is a Who's Who of NoCal and SoCal stop-motion greats, including Seamus Walsh, Mark Caballero, Tom Gibbons and Carl Willat, and based on the evidence at hand, the honors should flow both ways.
Loom is about a little old lady with big work to do. We meet her sitting in front of her floor loom, set up in a corner of her urban apartment, where she sits in a wheelchair in a pool of light thrown from the single window. She's into a rhythm with her shuttle and yarn, working on a textile whose pattern we can't quite see, when she's interrupted by the sound of a cello. She wheels herself to the window and opens it to see the source of the music. Moments later a younger man of indeterminate age comes into the room. He hands her a bag, then a pair of scissors; then he gets behind the wheelchair and pushes her out of the room.
Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. Allow 36 hours before exposing to moisture. OK to sand.
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