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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.05 - AUGUST 2000
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Fresh from the Festivals: August 2000's Film Reviews
Sheep in the Big City "Chapter 2: Sheep on the Lam" Sheep in the Big City tells the story of a runaway farm animal that is being tracked by the Top Secret Military Organization. Each half-hour episode includes a series of chapters with cliffhanger endings, held together by English-language narration, satirical skits and mock advertisements in the tradition of Rocky & Bullwinkle. I was also reminded of the work of Ernie Pintoff as I watched this 7-minute chapter, "Sheep on the Lam." The animation style and humor is typical of a number of the original series being aired on The Cartoon Network, which often have a 'retro' look drawn from popular animation of the 1950s and 1960s, such as UPA (Columbia) animation and Jay Ward Productions. While the animation style of Sheep in the Big City is limited, it is stylized -- more complex than most of those early examples. Its content is also updated, as Sheep takes refuge in the big city, finding work as a telemarketer and obtaining his green food from a ready teller machine (US dollars). I really liked a segment where Sheep, somehow mistaken for a lovely woman (she's wearing a dress because the cleaner didn't have her wool ready on time), is taken out to dinner and applies lipstick at the table. It seems this series holds a lot of promise and undoubtedly will make a great addition to the list of 'winners' already produced by The Cartoon Network.
Hello, Dolly! Hoshi has created many nice effects in this film, which opens with a silhouette of a man preparing for sleep. The character becomes three-dimensional after we enter the room and see him tossing and turning in bed. Cinematic effects are used throughout the telling of the story, with a variety of angles and framing sizes used to reveal the man's work and his state of mind. Included is a great black and white dream sequence, which establishes the man as a Frankenstein-like creator who is cloning sheep. The ending shot, too, where we see the sheep's revenge, is also nicely done. Overall, it is apparent that Hoshi has a strong sense of how visuals can tell a story; no dialogue is used in this very well-structured 3-minute film. Hello, Dolly!, which screened at SIGGRAPH this year, among other festivals, was created entirely on SGI machines. Softimage was the main software used for animation and modeling, while Composer and Pandemonium were used for editing, compositing, and some of the visual effects. Sound was processed using ProTool on a Macintosh computer.
Atlas Gets a Drink Basically, the film is about the complete dissolution of rational order on earth. It all starts when two fish decide to get out of the sea and walk on earth. Chaos ensues as other animals follow suit. A shark rings a doorbell and gobbles up the inhabitant and a killer whale rings a doorbell ("Who's there?" "Killer Whale") and is true to his name. One of the most inventive portions of the film is when a cow, grazing peacefully, eyes the two fish and then eats the little bunny sitting next to him, along with a person. Ever seen the inside of a cow's stomach or wondered how regurgitation feels? Here's your chance. But this is not a sick and twisted adventure -- it all makes sense in this wonderfully absurd environment. A minimal English-language soundtrack adds to the asynchronous feel of Overbeck's new world. The 3.5-minute film was created with drawn animation, along with Flash Three and Premiere, which was used for editing. Maureen Furniss, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Film Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. She is the founding editor of Animation Journal and the author of Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics (John Libbey, 1998).
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