Never sappy or cloying, JoJo in the Stars is incandescent and infused with showbiz tragedy. © StudioAKA.

JoJo in the Stars
Marc Craste is an animator stabled at London production house StudioAKA. He’s directed several appealing commercials, from a traffic safety PSA to a truly mind-bending, "have to watch it three times every time" spot for Compaq (all downloadable from the StudioAKA Website). Between projects Craste has hatched a series of three black-and-white short-shorts that take place in a world he’s created called Pica Towers. JoJo in the Stars is the elegiac, 13-minute film that has blossomed from these early vignettes.

Pica Towers is a mile-high office block, or apartment block, or gulag — anyway, it’s definitely multi-purpose — sitting alone in a deserted plain. In the three short-shorts — The Good News, Hound of Flesh, and Pizza Sangre — there are odd shenanigans afoot, from a sniper killing a pizza delivery boy to a dog stealing a blind man’s cane to a religious proselytizer with a knife in his back. Craste’s short-legged characters are plump and chunky in the manner of Pokémon, but built from discarded TVs and covered in a tough outer shell that gleams dully like Michael Keaton’s body armor from the first Batman movie.

But what really puts this intangible CGI world into the realm of “Good Christ, I’ve been there” recognizability is the weather. Trapped in late afternoon, beset by towering anvil clouds, and choking in more particulate matter than central Idaho in fire season, this is a place you’ll swear you visited on vacation the year your vacation was ruined.

JoJo in the Stars focuses on Madame Pica’s freak show, held regularly inside Pica Towers. JoJo is a winged trapeze artist and the show’s star attraction, and one fan comes night after night in the throes of obsession to watch her act. After yet another evening’s performance, Jojo retreats to her locked cage for the night, but her bunny-eared, bright-eyed admirer approaches by stealth and unlocks the cage, whisking her away. They spend a few blissful minutes in another room lost in the moonlight fancy of each other’s eyes before the furious Madame Pica and her minions burst in. The pair jump out the high window in desperation, Jojo holding her suitor aloft as best she can, but her wings and her grip are too weak and the man slips from her hand and falls to his doom.

Far from being sappy or cloying, the scenario and the epilogue that follow are incandescent with classic showbiz tragedy. Like The Saddest Music in the World and Tod Browning’s Freaks, with which JoJo shared a festival bill this July, JoJo lives in a world of arch melodrama anchored by a doomed romance. That’s a genre with a built-in wink, which is appropriate given Craste’s goofy design sense, partial as he is to characters resembling phosphorescent Pikachus in black leather. But beyond all its component parts, this is simply strong filmmaking, of a caliber to make you forget it’s animated.

Around your fourth viewing, you’ll be able to take yourself out of the film long enough to notice the animation technique, which is superbly textured and acted. Lacking eyebrows or shoulders, and without a word spoken by the two main characters, the animators get their acting done almost entirely with eye shape. Special mention is warranted of the short’s signature tune, performed by offbeat instrumental ensemble Die Knödel (The Noodle): “Harlem in Br*nn” is an achingly melancholy, three-hankie wonder made from equal parts Schubert and Nino Rota.

Harmony in Red evokes Dr. Seuss and childhood dreams. © Niki Hyun Jeong Yang.

Harmony in Red
Niki Yang followed up her 2002 short Demitri’s Violin with her 2003 senior project at CalArts, Harmony in Red. Again an eccentric visual sensibility grounded in the works of John Hubley is on full display as Yang illustrates an arboreal tale of a raccoon and a pinecone.

In an open landscape a raccoon is curled up dreaming on the ground, the passage of time marked overhead by an ever-kicking bicycle wheel a-rollin’ way in the middle of the air. He dreams of a forest full of life, but wakes to the same old rolling hills with their blighted earth tones. Unexpectedly, though, there’s a yellow balloon hovering nearby, tied to something. To his surprise it’s a pinecone, a real one, and he doesn’t hesitate to plant it and give it shade. There are other creatures nearby, benign and giggly, but the raccoon chases them away — trees are his bailiwick.

In short order there’s a patch of green on the ground, the only green for miles and it grows into a giant psychedelic bonsai with red trunk and green and yellow leaves. The forest spreads, but until the raccoon can figure out what’s missing from the picture he repudiates the outside world and lines the forest’s perimeter with a barbed-wire fence. Finally it’s up to a family of monkeys to breach the fence and make the raccoon see the error of his ways.

Harmony in Red would perform well on the bottom half of a double bill with The Lorax; it’s a sequel of sorts to the ecologically-minded Dr. Seuss story, a tale of a forest rebuilt told not with humans but the forest animals themselves. Really, though, as the prologue and epilogue suggest, this is a people story, and the tone of the motherly murmurs of “It’s going to be all right” in the opening frames suggest this was mined from the artist’s own childhood dreams.

The visuals will certainly make you flash back to naptimes of yore: Yang’s original drawings in watercolor, pencil and charcoal were digitally manipulated in After Effects and Premiere to give a soaring, seamless feeling of infinite possibility.

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. His article on the making of Twice Upon a Time will be published at some point. Meanwhile look for his new novel, Gethsemane for Chim Chim. (Don’t buy it, just look for it.)