Fresh from the Festivals: November 2008's Reviews
The Old, Old, Very Old Man The Old, Old, Very Old Man relates the true story of Thomas Parr, who was summoned by King Charles I in the hopes that he would reveal the secret of his longevity to the king.
At the time, Parr was 152-years-old.
Parr refused multiple invitations from Charles, not wanting to make the long journey from his home to London. Eventually, the King's entreaties wore down Parr's resistance, and Parr undertook the long journey, accompanied by the King's loyal soldiers.
Upon Parr's arrival, Charles was so taken by him that he ordered an immediate celebration of Parr's life… a celebration that, ironically, led to Parr's death.
The animation in The Old, Old, Very Old Man is as simple as animation can be. Director Elizabeth Hobbs animated the film using blue ink manipulated on a single white bathroom tile. She drew inspiration from Holland's Delft tiles, reflecting their spare, simple decorative style. Hobbs would capture a frame, erase the animated portion of the tile, painted the next sequence in the motion, capture the frame, and so on. When a shot was completed, she would wipe the tile clean and start on the next one. The only surviving artifact from the film's production is a slightly scratched white tile.
The images were captured using stop-motion and edited using Final Cut Pro, and there was no post-production, except that the shots were graded once the film had been edited. It's a very spare, simple production, but the method of animation suits the subject matter and storytelling approach perfectly. It's very subdued and straightforward, much like Thomas Parr must have been.
The second film in this month's lineup also deals with death, although with a much more reserved, "this happens to everyone" sort of approach.
Sandbox A boy and a girl are playing on a swing set as a smaller girl observes. A small missile makes its way onscreen and obliterates the swinging girl as her companions watch, relatively unaffected by the destruction. The discorporated girl becomes a spectral angel, and she lazily drifts by a sandbox, where another child meets his fate, also in the form of an errant missile. He becomes an angel as well, drifts along to another venue and so on. It would be tragic if it weren't so funny, but at the same time, it would be funny if it weren't so tragic.
Ofer's drawing style is very simple, just a few steps beyond stick figures in the level of detail, which makes the story all the more compelling and makes it that much easier for viewers to relate to his characters. If the figures were any simpler, we'd feel no more sympathy for them than we would for any of the disposable characters that populate any number of Don Hertzfeldt shorts, and if the figures were any more complicated, we'd feel too emotionally attached to them to watch one innocent bystander after another reduced to atoms as unseen, unstoppable forces set upon them.
The film moves at quick clip, which is not surprising, given Ofer's approach to Sandbox. He came up with the overall plot of the film a few weeks before the second Lebanon war started. There was no storyboard or written script used at any point during the creation of the film, and the story was more or less "improvised" (if you can do such a thing when you're illustrating a story one frame at a time), with no editing and no revisions or clean-up along the way. Artwork was created directly on a Wacom tablet, and Flash 4.0 software was used to animate the film.
It's a very "down and dirty" way to animate, and the film shows it. It's an uncomplicated look at a complicated issue, but the end result is thoroughly engaging and entertaining.
The third film in this month's "FFF" continues the "doomed world" theme in Avi Ofer's short Sandbox, which tells the tale of "a typical day at the playground interrupted."
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