AWN’s latest survey highlights under-the-radar animated shorts currently making their way through the festival circuit or newly available for online viewing.
This month in Binocular Briefs, we explore films featuring an obsessive love letter writer, a man navigating a hijacked, Grand Theft Auto-style videoscape, rhythm-driven skiers, frustratingly long on-hold phone calls, and one particularly amorous sausage.
Kafka. In Love, Zane Oborenko, Latvia/Czech Republic
Dust-like particles float haphazardly across an undefined, grayish, static background that gradually forms the shape of a man and some scattered sheets of paper. Collapsed on the floor, he draws a female figure on a steamed-up mirror. This man seems painfully in love with someone unattainable and maybe even unreal.
In 1920, Franz Kafka began a relationship with a married woman named Milena Jesenská. He wrote her over 120 letters, later compiled into the book Letters to Milena. Kafka. in Love draws inspiration from this book, transforming it into an exploration of the intense, almost schizophrenic nature of love - the push and pull, the insecurities, the doubts, the rages. What is this maddening force that brings us both orgasmic bliss and stomach-clenching, hand-wringing pain?
Says Oborenko, “Reading Kafka's Letters to Milena, I recognized parts of my own experiences, bridging an unexpected 100-year gap, particularly on the emotional level. The letters provided a rare, honest record of falling in love and offered a male perspective, making me realize how distance in romantic relationships often fuels idealization and self-centered fantasies. This led me to see that falling in love can be surprisingly egocentric, as we project our desires onto someone we hardly know, focusing more on ourselves than on the real person we believe we love.”
Kafka. in Love was created primarily with layered sand animation assembled in After Effects, with some scenes rotoscoped. The final scene includes a single filmed element - a spinning droplet - while Kafka’s handwriting, sourced from original letters, was animated using traditional 2D techniques.
These chiaroscuro-dominated visuals evoke the essence of love, as light and darkness intertwine, engage, and part in an endless, looping dance.
Freeride in C, Edmunds Jansons, Latvia
"As we go up, we go down," said some pre-Socratic thinker long before Robert Pollard sang those words. They may seem simple, yet they aptly capture the essence of life, with its looping highs and lows. Perhaps there’s no better symbol of this message than the ski hill, where the ephemeral bliss of racing freely down a mountain is inevitably met with the arduous (imagine no ski lifts here!) Sisyphean climb back to that initial point of joy.
This recent Grand Prize winner at the Fredrikstad Animation Festival is a stunning audiovisual journey that celebrates the beauty of rhythm on a ski hill. Sky blues, snowy whites, and stop-sign reds create a visually hypnotic backdrop for Janson's playful loops. More than just an experiment in sound and rhythm, Freeride in C pays homage to the history of abstract animation (with ski hill names referencing animation greats) and unabashedly celebrates the sights, sounds, rhythms, and transient joys of life.
On Hold, Delia Hess, Switzerland
As antisocial or introverted as I may be, there's nothing more infuriating than being stuck on hold, desperately trying to reach an actual human being - who inevitably can’t answer your question and just transfers you to yet another department. But after the anger fades, you slip into a strange, dreamlike state, like that space between wakefulness and sleep, where your mind drifts into odd, ungraspable thoughts, hovering between real and imagined. You know what I mean, right? Please tell me you understand, or I might be in for some tough conversations with my therapist.
And that, in essence, is what Delia Hess’s On Hold explores: the beauty and strangeness of a drifting mind as it contemplates life with all its Escher-like repetition, quirks, and absurdities.
Vegan Mayo, Luca Toth, Hungary
Born under the sign of Gemini - along with a heap of other astrological nonsense - this eccentric sausage fancies herself a "justice warrior" and “super empath.” Mostly, though, she seems more focused on finding a man and getting it on.
Awash in neon-bubblegum-colored backgrounds, Vegan Mayo radiates the enticing, hypnotic allure of a candy shop for the sexually deprived.
It’s a surreal, comic, and dreamy work that might make you re-think eating meat but that could also make both Betty and Barry White moan like cracked eggs sizzling on a nympho’s G-spot.
Kinderfilm, Total Refusal, Austria
Total Refusal is the latest sensation on the animation circuit, a collective pushing the boundaries of machinima with a sharper, more purposeful edge. This self-described pseudo-Marxist group delves into video game mechanics, twisting them into incisive commentaries on labor, capitalism, and, ultimately, existence itself. They repeatedly pose an unsettling question: is dedicating our lives to serving others and enriching the wealthy really our purpose?
If you think the answer is yes, maybe it's time to reconsider.
In Kinderfilm, the collective takes a slight detour from the documentary-political tone of their previous works, maintaining their signature sardonic humor while shifting to a more existential focus. The film follows Edgar Thompson, who experiences an “odd feeling” in his gut. Edgar drifts through a Grand Theft Auto-style world, encountering people who seem nearly lifeless and stagnant. He observes family barbecues, playgrounds, amusement parks, and seascapes, all painted with an undercurrent of emptiness - a reflection of the void Edgar feels inside.
Ultimately, a yellow school bus catches his attention, and he eagerly boards, passing a cemetery in a symbolic nod to the world’s lack of mystery, excitement, or possibility. It's a world that’s become sterile, a simulacrum devoid of life and wonder - because, well, we let it become that.
Yet dour reflections aside, the film’s utterly bizarre ending manages to confound, amuse, and inject a glimmer of life and hope into the story.
A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
