Early Bloomer: Too cute and cuddly? © Sony Imageworks.

Early Bloomer
Early Bloomer is a wholesome morality tale in CGI starring a cast of tadpoles. In a pond near you, five tadpole buddies are cutting up, zooming in and out of broken bottles and tin cans, with the biggest of the bunch, an awkward green tadpole named Lilly, bringing up the rear. Unable to keep up, Lilly is closing in on her peer group when they begin to stare and lower their eyes significantly. It seems Lilly is now dragging an embarrassing new set of protuberances: a pair of legs. Mocked by her friends in her moment of puberty, Lilly slinks away alone. The other tadpoles are having a good laugh at her expense when suddenly to their horror they all sprout similar pairs of pedal limbs; a quick swim later, they find Lilly, parade their legs about, and all is reconciled.

Early Bloomer began as an in-house training exercise at Sony Pictures Imageworks; it was rushed to theaters in May 2003 to capitalize on the success of The Chubbchubbs!, another Sony short that had won an Oscar two months earlier. With its friendly, well-lit sets and cuddly, round characters, Early Bloomer is Adorable with a capital A and the results are dispiritingly saccharine. The three-minute short played in front of Daddy Day Care and was included on that film’s DVD release last September. It was directed by Chubbchubbs storyboard artist Kevin Johnson. The music is by Mark Mancina (Brother Bear, Speed 2: Cruise Control).

A rest home is the setting for The Old Fools. © Ruth Lingford.

The Old Fools
“At death you break up: the bits that were you/Start speeding away from each other for ever/With no one to see.” In The Old Fools, an animated short directed by Ruth Lingford based on the Philip Larkin poem of the same name, Larkin’s figurative lines come to literal life in tender drawings of old-age pensioners awaiting death. Lingford earned a B.A. in fine art and art history in 1990 after spending half a life as an occupational therapist working with the mentally ill and elderly. Since then she’s attended the Royal College of Art’s Animation School and directed a series of shorts, including What She Wants, Death and the Mother and Pleasures of War.

The Old Fools is a hybrid of drawn and digital desktop techniques unfolding in a world of deep, deep blue backgrounds, with highlights of white and black and, occasionally, a warm burst of red. An opening montage of knitting hands gives way to a grid of rectangles that resolve to playing cards, which upturned reveal the icons of a perverse game of Memory — dentures, TV, catheter, ear, pills, penis, slippers – none of which produces a matching pair. Memories — lost, retained, or transformed — become the dominant theme of the piece; silhouettes of elderly women against a window transform into soldiers parading across a background of antique wallpaper, and empty eye sockets become dark tunnels terminating in well-lit furnished rooms of the past.

Lingford’s visuals examine the human body as much in the process of birth as in the waiting game of old age. In one sequence sprightly strands of DNA coalesce into a blastocyst that expands, sunflower-like, into an ever-expanding mass of cells; in another, an elderly man transforms into a fetus that shrinks to embryo and then to nothingness. Her animator’s kitbag includes digital video and digitally manipulated photographs, but for the most part this is a traditionally animated short in a realistically drawn style. The sound design enhances the lonely mood; there’s no music to soothe or spike the emotions, just a documentary collage of coughing and dripping taps. Pop songwriter and film actor Bob Geldof narrates Philip Larkin’s poem.

In The Old Fools, Ruth Lingford and her production team have painfully and successfully evoked the world of the rest home: a world of cold quiet where twilight shadows darken the day room, skeletons push strollers and men and women sit and stare into the middle distance of remembrance.

Taylor Jessen is a freelance writer. He works Saturdays in a used bookstore. He has learned much from his job; in January 2001, for example, he discovered that people who buy Kant never need a bag.