First, start here: http://www.awn.com/articles/columnists/animation-pimp-greetings-st-helena

I'll wait. 

dum dum dum dum dum dum dum

Ten years have passed since that I wrote that. How's internal selection going?

Let me tell ya:

"Is he just giving us all the finger?" said someone to someone about someone during the something something animation festival.

"God, why on earth did he choose this?" told the other one to another one that's not the same someone at the something animation festival.

"Are you drunk?" I've asked myself watching a few competition screenings over the years whilst wondering why I selected a few of the films.

Was no easier when we had a selection committee. I got ripped all the time for their choices. Didnt bother me. I just blamed them. Hell, half the time I agreed with the rippers. Cant do that no more. S'okay.  Bullets bounce off me like raisins off a Prius.

 

There are films that have blitzed my senses into giddy, drunken stupors of delirium and bewilderment, riotous exhalings of creativity, desperation, and experimentation. Too often, these voices expire as rapidly as they respired, brief greetings before vanishing into the crowded darkness.

 

There’s no point lamenting. It is what it is. We all go hoping

Three of those films come from an Tie Domi-looking punk named JJ Villard. In the early 2000s, he exploded onto the festival scene with three beat up beauts: the creepy 9 in a Chimney or 10 on the Bed or Hates a Strong Word (2002), Son of Satan

a raw, urgent punk scream against the pain of abuse, bullying and the cyclical nature of violence, Chestnuts Icelolly (2004) is sadistic little tale about a scumbag who lures children into his icelolly machine/

BOOM. Three years plus of great student films that took animation down  a whole other path of filth aint encountered since Ralph Baksi.

As I sat, picking my balls (pre-2011, hence balls), nothing arrived. There were no more villard entries. Again, the next year, NOTHING.

I heard rumours. JJ finally settles the talk... 

A partner in crime at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, recently suggested that I should address a relatively familiar (meaning it was probably two people who asked) question asking why we don't show more funny films.  Believe me, I want to show funny films. If I could, that's all we'd be showing. The problem, mon chums, is that I just don't think that most of you make funny films.

Every being strives after pleasure, and it is in pleasure that happiness consists.

-- Epicurus

There's a party in my tummy!

(So yummy! So yummy!)

Carrots in my tummy!

(Party-Party!)

-- Brobee the green monster

I see a lot of TV animation for kids. Sounds pretty enviable, doesn’t it? Well, it is when you stumble upon godsends like the shows Yo Gabba Gabba or Jack’s Big Music Show (okay, Jack is only animation in spirit).  Otherwise, it’s a pretty hellish experience being forced to hear god-awful music and watch screaming adult-voiced kids, bad animation, idiotic storylines, and annoying dialogue, writing, and plots that read like they’re were made by a factory of Ned Flanders clones. Trifles, “that are nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything.”  They lack an “overflowing abundance, that je ne sais quoi which might even be the soul.”

Before he croaked, I wrote a play for the great Polish animator/artist/grump Jan Lenica.

Circa. 2000.

Ionesco thinks it’s genius. Lenica said he didn’t understand.

Ottawa. It is a Sunday afternoon in late July. It is unusually hot. We are in a bar. Many unusual characters are sitting outside at the cobblestone patio. They sit in dirty white plastic chairs drinking out of dirty white plastic glasses on dirty white plastic tables. The sound of birds are heard in a tree near the patio. Ah the birds...the birds....the birds. An elderly man passes. He stops to give change to a cheerful, smooth dancing panhandler before passing under the tree, entering the patio and sitting at a table down stage centre. He is a distinguished, but sad looking man in his 70s.  At the same time a young middle age man arrives and sits at the same table. M is unshaven, with thick unkept brown hair, wrinkled clothes, spectacles. He is pale and tired. The older man, J,  carries with him a solid patch of grey hair, a black suit, red tie....not literally of course. They are meeting.

J: You’re late
M: You just arrived.
J: I am old. I told you many times.
M: So leave earlier.
J: You don’t like old people do you?
M: Why do you say that?
J: I’ve told you about my poor health many times.
M: No you haven’t. Once maybe.
J: Nevertheless.
M: Most of you become lazy and silly.
J: Stupid youth.
M: You should know.
J: I see you’ve had another late night.
M: You’re right. I was busy working on this bloody article.
J: Why do it? You haven’t even seen half the work.
M: Everyone told me you’re a master.
J: You listen to them?
M: Have you read my work?
J: No.

 

 

There are films that have blitzed my senses into giddy, drunken stupors of delirium and bewilderment, riotous exhalings of creativity, desperation, and experimentation. Too often, these voices expire as rapidly as they respired, brief greetings before vanishing into the crowded darkness.

There’s no point lamenting. It is what it is. We all go hoping.

One of the first animation films to short circuit me was Hilary by then Royal College of Art graduate, Anthony Hodgson. It was 1995. Annecy. Satie inspired piano notes. A man plays. A boy sits on the floor nearby banging his toy. Quietly annoyed, the man puts his young daughter to bed. As the man takes the girl to his room, he tells her the sad story of a feckless woman (the girl's Mom? the girl's future?)) named Hilary. Technically unpolished,  this dark, moving, and absurd dreamscape danced awkwardly on the screen. I sat mesmerized by the crisp Hal Hartleyesque dialogue and the beautifully detached voice born of cross breeding Sterling Hayden with Martin Donovan.

As I sit in the chemo clinic lazy boy chair, I see a headline on the tv about an episode of South Park inspiring students at a Canadian school to have a "Kick a Ginger"  Day.

I laughed and imagined kicking Seth Green in Radio Days.

Nurse looks up at me.

My IV bag shook.

While the bleomycin continues to drip in my arm, I grab my ipad and find more about the story. Turns out some grade 9 girl and some other red heads got kicked in the legs repeatedly by eager classmates. It was not the first time the girl had experienced Kick a Ginger Day. She's been through it in elementary school. Last year, she stayed home. Guess she figured high school kids were more mature.

Roots of the day go back to a 2005 episode of South Park called, "Kick a Ginger." Naturally... the South Park gurus intended to MOCK bigots not encourage them. Naturally. Seems, Kick a Ginger Day has become a big thing at schools in North America. Lots of charges and suspensions for kicking fiery reds.

It's under control though. One important adult said firmly, "We will talk to the kids that this is not acceptable behaviour. You can't be doing this to other people. It's not right. This has to be a teachable moment, that this is not how you behave and there will be consequences for their actions."

I can't stop laughing. If it was my kid, I'd be furious. Probably kick the thugs in the teeth till they were menstrual red. It's the naivety of the statement that gets me. "It's not right." Yes, we know that. We know it's not fucking right. Not a lot IS right about MUCH. That's the way the world fucking works. The world is a result of errors and fantasies. Maybe I feel relief. Kids are still assholes. They still bully. Yeah it sucks, but it's human.

Giggling, I fantasize kicking various red heads: Archie Andrews, Rita Hayworth, Alexander Petrov, Carrot Top, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, heh.. all Scottish people.

As the nurse switches the etopocide drip to cisplatin, hairs tumble drunkenly onto my shirt sleeve. My hairs. Not unusual for chemo, except that the hairs are red.

Hide the children, put away your daughters, he is coming. That prevert of the Baltics, Priit Pärn. The barely-a-man looks like a dressed up caveman. Just try and talk to him. Hear those grunts? They’re real. This Estonian creature is a danger to all that is good and righteous and pristine about cartoons. He is everything Pixar is not: dirty, preverted, confusing, intellectual, some even say, funny. This is why the American authorities have him on their watch list. They wait for him to stumble so they can haul his ass to Guantanamo Bay and make him eat carrots (raw) and listen to ABBA.

Why you ask?

I have asked and no one seems to have an answer. One investigator likened the Pärn experience to getting a BIG box at Xmas. You open it to find another box, then open that box to find another box. Yet, unlike my experience of finding just a tiny box of nothing at the end, Pärn viewers will find something that confuses them. They don't know what to make of it. Is it a joke? Is it a deeply spiritual gift? What the hell is it?

The Pimp’s Super Fantastic Lollipops Guide to Festival Submissions (a.k.a. The Uncertainty Principle)

1. Literacy is Important

Read the FAQS page. Festival staff frequently receive questions that are answered word for word on the FAQ page.

2. Little is not big

A five-minute film does not a feature film make.

3. I love Coldplay. Yay!

Making a film and slapping on the latest Radiohead or B. Hamilton song does not mean it’s a music video. See, if ya read it, Music video means commissioned…that means that the band asked you to make a video for them. It does not mean making a bad mix of your favourite dinky song and just randomly putting it on your film

December 21st, 2011.

Whilst kneeling in an alley out back from the Dominion pub in downtown Montrose, NY, the Anton Chekov whispers in my ear : "Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought.

“The best of us,” countered a voice from the shadows, “can say in a sentence what everyone else says in a book.”

Back in the bar, a voice:  “I don’t mean to bother you, sir, but were there some trends you noticed?”

“Fish, lots of fish.”

“Are you seeing more digital?”

“Fish, lots of fish.”

“Can you give me anything?”

“They’re getting longer.... much longer. Lots of these short ass punks are making big fat pimply assed fatties.”