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.

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from each film by simply clicking the image.

Fable (2005), 7:00, directed by Daniel Sousa (Portugal/U.S.). Contact: Daniel Sousa [E] contact@danielsousa.com [W] www.danielsousa.com, www.handcrankedfilm.com

Arrest Assured (2004), 2:25, directed by Michael McCormick and Robert Taylor (U.S.). Contact: Ian Transifguracion, Pendulum 2970 Fifth Avenue, Suite 320, San Diego, CA 92103, U.S. [E] iant@studiopendulum.com [W] www.studiopendulum.com, www.studiopendulum.com/arrestassured

Sunday Party (2006), 18:00, directed by Sirirat Thawilvejakul (Thailand). Contact: Sirirat Thawilvejakul [E] yoooom@gmail.com

No Room for Gerold (Kein Platz für Gerold) (2006), 4:55, directed by Daniel Nocke (Germany). Contact: Studio FILM BILDER, Ostendstr. 106, 70188 Stuttgart, Germany [T] 0049.711.481027 [F] 0049.711.4891925 [E] studio@filmbilder.de [W] www.filmbilder.de

Never Like the First Time! (Aldrig som första gången!) (2006), 14:30, directed by Jonas Odell (Sweden). Contact: [W] www.filmtecknarna.se

Tit-for-tat gets morphological in Fable. © Daniel Sousa.

Fable
Two shapeshifters in a war of attrition meet in a forest glade in Fable from animator Daniel Sousa. Somewhere in a temperate clime there’s a house at the edge of a wilderness. In the forest are a hunter and his dog; in the house is a woman living alone. The piece opens on the hunter, who is coldly raising his rifle and firing at an owl in flight, which drops through the tree branches to an uncertain fate.

Back at the house, the woman, whose solid figure resembles the sculptures of Henry Moore, put two feet gingerly on the tile floor. One foot is bloody. The house is a well-appointed affair with a main hall done in antique red wallpaper with a floral pattern that has a life of its own — it expands and recedes as the mood takes it. She pours water from a cistern and leaves the room, and the camera transitions down through the floorboards, crawlspace, bricks, and stone foundation, into the soil beneath — where tree roots are aggressively filling all available space.

Tilting up again, the scene shifts to the woods, where the hunter’s dog waits for its master. From the right comes a slowly lumbering stag, which disappears on one side of a tree and reappears on the other as the hunter, his gun at the ready. The man scratches the back of his neck, which is scarred by three vertical slashes, and then he puts one hand carefully on a nearby tree as if for reassurance.

The woman is still at home, sitting on her bed upstairs combing her hair as the wind blows the curtains around her open window. Suddenly she stops and inhales deeply. She moves to the window and surveys the countryside, her eyes moving from macro to micro, from near to telescopically distant. She grinds the fingers of her left hand on the windowsill, where the wood is already worried with three talon-like grooves. She sees the distant stag, blinks, and suddenly there’s an owl perched where the woman had been.

She flies off to exact yet another revenge, and collect yet another souvenir — of the kind that hunters everywhere mount on walls and car hoods - but this isn’t their first confrontation and it won’t be their last. When these two meet, it’s a brief, bloody fight with cries of pain and gnashing teeth on both sides — but what’s most beautiful about this short film is the idea that there’s a third party here, someone arboreal who isn’t taking sides. There are hints, before the violence and in the aftermath — and in a tantalizing flash-frame in the middle of it - that someone with roots and a completely different set of priorities is keeping a close eye on this pair, at home and in the wild.

The animalia theme is of a piece with the classic, very old-school Greco-Roman mythical influences present in Sousa’s other films. The Portugal-born animator’s short Carnal Ground from 1994 depicts a starving hunter in a deserted plain who finds a tantalizing but bewildering prey in the form of a great shape-shifting beast — one that would make great food if he only had the courage to destroy a magical thing. Sousa also created a traditional/stop-motion short called Minotaur in 1998, where the well-known bull/human of Greek myth haunts a lonely labyrinth, and a little girl and another mysterious guest intrude on his solitude and upset his world.

Fable is a traditionally-animated short composited digitally, with original drawings in a variety of media including inks and oils, and it’s stunningly beautiful. The sound design is strongly organic and the music endorses and amplifies the emotion without calling attention to itself. Sousa’s character acting is strong, and though the emotions are clear and familiar, the story is surreal enough to remain open to interpretation.