Animation Shorts without Dogs

Apparently there are so many dogs in animation today they got their own program. No dogs in Monday night's animation program, although there was a giant hippopotamus, a raven voiced by Sir Ian McKellan, a polar bear and his penguin girlfriend, some undead elephants and a walrus. Well, The Walrus, as in John Lennon.

It's an irony about reviewing short film nights that the review can end up being inappropriately long as you try to give each film at least a cursory mention. So I won't go through them all. My favourite was probably Procrastination, a flow of animation passing from one medium to another, stop motion to drawn to computer generated, accompanied by a clever voice-over track. That and the John Lennon one, which used animation to illustrate a conversation that the film-maker had recorded as a teenager after sneaking into Lennon's hotel. It too used a flowing style, each image extending into and becoming the next.

It's a popular style these days, this sense of morph and motion, but for me it still depends on having a solid underlying story to work. Sense of Space for Urban People, for instance, did some stylish flowing animations but without any real narrative, became a bit meaningless. Conversely, Keith Reynolds Can't Make it Tonight used computer generated stick figures and succeeded because of a clever script.

The other trend I'm seeing in animation, and which was certainly felt in the night's program, is its use to address dark themes. Perhaps this is because dark stories become too lurid if told in flesh and blood. Or perhaps animators simply have dark imaginations. Or maybe the lack of dogs made things seem darker.

I found it interesting that the films I gravitated to were the ones that could be classed as animated documentaries. My hunger for reality has grown, it seems, since doing this course.