The pacing is exquisite in Prowlies at the River, as is the color palette. © Adam Phillis/Brackenwood Ent.

Prowlies at the River
Brackenwood is an animated forest glade populated by a mean hairy-faced faun, a hairless Sasquatch, a simpleminded elf, jet-black lizardy things called Prowlies, and a raspberry-blowing bird that looks like a cross between a canary and a dodge ball. Creator Adam Phillips has done some wonderfully cinematic things with it, and he has enough faith in its success that he gave up a 12-year-stint at DisneyToon Studios in Sydney to devote himself to it full-time. BiteyCastle.com is Phillips’ playground as well as his new career, named after Bitey, the unshorn, cloven-footed hero of his latest short film Prowlies at the River.

It’s best to watch the three previous Brackenwood shorts, all done in Flash, before taking in Prowlies, but Phillips’ pacing and characterizations are so strong that you don’t require any previous introduction to his imaginary cast. Bitey is asleep in his hollowed-out tree one morning, dreaming of fun and horseplay with Giblet, the canary/dodgeball, when a loud pecking wakes him. An olive-colored woodpecker thing is harassing him, and Bitey fells it with a thrown rock. Unluckily the bird falls in his local water supply and contaminates it, so Bitey swings away in the branches to visit the local river.

At riverside the aforementioned Prowlies are cavorting in the grass, chasing each other and lazing in the sun. Bitey comes crashing into their reverie, so naturally they pounce; and he counterattacks, sending one flying over the river and the other four scampering into a tree. Bitey hops into the river for a drink, but the Prowlies start to guffaw. Bitey can’t figure out what’s so funny — and then he sees what’s going on upstream.

Like his other films, even his admittedly crude early efforts, Phillips’ pacing is exquisite in Prowlies at the River, with his action being all the more effective complemented with stillness and quiet, or just a well-timed blink of the eyes. Most of his work is dialogue-free and he gets great mileage out of simple gestures and facial tics. The blues, greens and rich browns of temperate climes after a heavy rain dominate his color palette.

You can catch all of his films but one on his website, the one being his mini-epic, pod-people music video for the Ween song Transdermal Celebration (it’s on a Ween concert DVD, and there’s a link to an online copy at milkandcookies.com). You can watch them in chronological order — his debut Flash animation, Pokies, is pretty impressive for a first effort — but I suggest you save the Hitchhiker pair for last. It’s a sublime creep-out adventure tale in two parts that will keep you guessing to the last moment.

If you think you get the point of And Still I Remain (like a fish out of water), then you don’t really get the point. © Tom Gibbons/Downtime Films.

And Still I Remain (like a fish out of water)
Tom Gibbons, painter and animator of The Hunger Artist has a new short called And Still I Remain (Like A Fish Out Of Water). It’s two minutes long and as open-ended as a Slinky. As in The Hunger Artist, his new short is stop-motion, this time using only paper cutouts, and Gibbons’ mastery of the technique comes through in his ultra-smooth flow and subtle follow-through.

To the sound of a mid-tempo shuffle with wordless vocals, a red curtain opens to reveal a man and woman on a stage. The man is seated, the woman lying prone in his lap. A quiet look between them indicates the ghost of a once-thriving love, and then she slips away and disappears. A hoop flies in from stage right, the man grabs it, and he holds it up as a series of animal masks soar in to land on his face and then jump through the non-flaming hoop. He lowers it to his lap, and then it catches on fire, burning down the stage.

When the flames clear the man is revealed with his hands raised in obeisance to some monster aphid-thing, blinking calmly and hopping on one giant leg. It hops offstage left. Then something monkey-like comes down on the end of a pole and makes the man shiver with fright. The monkey reaches offstage and plops a skeleton fright mask on the man’s head, then leaves. The man slumps, morose. A small crowd of forks rattles by downstage, and one pauses as the fright mask falls off the man’s head. The mask sticks on the end of the fork and both disappear stage left. Then the woman slides back onto the man’s lap from stage right, and the curtains close.

If you get the point of this, you’re probably missing the point. (Actually the content is up to you, but the artist’s take is that it’s about recurring relationships, which fits the piece right down to the “Again” tacked on at the finish, as it would be on an Internet Flash animation.) Every bit of this avant-garde truffle is as friendly as can be. The sound effects are a grab bag of post-Hanna-Barbera tiddley winks, including the two-note marimba lick, slide whistle, creepy skeleton rattle and quacking duck. The short was originated on Super 8, and the affable graininess has been enhanced with artificial gate-slip and scratches added in After Effects.