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.

cNote (2004), 6:45, directed by Chris Hinton (Canada). Contact: Hélène Tanguay, Marketing Manager, NFB [E] h.tanguay@nfb.ca [W] www.nfb.ca

First Flight (2006), 8:00, directed by Kyle Jefferson and Cameron Hood (Canada). Contact: Olivier Mouroux, Paramount, [T] 818.695.3425 [F] 818.695.6180 [E] Omouroux@DreamWorks.com

Tragic Story with Happy Ending (Histórica Tràgica com Final Feliz) (2005), 7:40, directed by Regina Pessoa (Portugal). Contact: Julie Arseneault, Marketing Manager, NFB [E] j.arseneault@nfb.ca [W] www.nfb.ca

Puppet (2006), 6:30, directed by Patrick Smith (U.S.) Contact: Patrick Smith [E] pat@blendfilms.com [W] www.blendfilms.com

Shipwrecked (2005), 5:30, directed by Frodo Kuipers (The Netherlands). Contact: Aad van Ierland, RNTV [T] +31 (0) 35-672438 [E] rntv@rnw.nl

A hundred bucks? A Yucatan sinkhole? Or the middle of a piano? You may see them all in cNote. © 2004 National Film Board of Canada.

cNote
It’s been a good year for the late Norman McLaren — NFB has a seven-DVD box set out, and holy cats to that action (a full appreciation will be forthcoming in these pages in the next few weeks), and with his shorts touring the Americas in this 65th year of animation from the National Film Board, he’s getting more cultural headroom than ever. So I shouldn’t hesitate mentioning him up front as a preface to writing about Chris Hinton’s new short cNote, an abstract piece to a jazz soundtrack. As Hinton, or other abstractionists like Steve Woloshen, would surely agree, when it comes to non-narrative eye candy with a beat, McLaren casts such a long shadow there’s no point dodging it — sure, he did it first, and hats off to Hinton for carrying the torch.

Hinton’s cNote is about seven minutes long and accompanies a free-jazz workout by a septet with a clarinet out front. The long strings of clusters, silent spaces, and tone blasts the musicians deliver in the soundtrack are complemented by polygonal cutouts, squiggles, toothpick-matrix chains that spin and multiply like carbon compounds, little agitated clouds of fog, and tornadoes of alphabet letters. Separately the music and visuals would be standalone treats; together they coax a hundred moods into existence in rapid succession.

The pieces of arts-and-crafts detritus making merry all over the screen look at various times like cutout construction paper, distressed watercolors, scratches, crisp CG work, and that hair in the gate of the sixth-period educational film that crawls and crawls and suddenly leaps to freedom. The execution of mood shifts from peacefulness to frenzy is all in Hinton’s juxtaposition of one color against another: bright saturated rectangles coruscating wildly when all seven musicians improv at once, or a single red slash on a nervous background throbbing with sparks and possibility when the clarinetist teases a continuum of textures out of a long held note.

Hinton is the creator of some truly out-of-control comedy masterpieces, including A Nice Day in the Country and his recent Oscar-nominated short Nibbles. cNote takes the raw, mad energy propelling these earlier works and pushes it to the foreground, and like McLaren did in Blinkety Blank and Hen Hop and so many other seminal shorts he smashes visual excitement onto the proscenium frame, turning that TV or movie theater screen from a window onto drama into — briefly — a gallery wall with a 24-painting-per-second refresh rate.