+12: Great Animation Right Now
Current highlights from the underground.
Happy Thursday! This is the twelfth bonus issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Thanks for tuning in — and welcome to our new members. Today, we’re looking at five films that recently wowed us on the festival circuit.
Even though we often spotlight retro work, we pay close attention to what’s new in animation. So, we were honored when GIRAF asked us a few weeks ago to serve on its jury this year. Based in Calgary, GIRAF is the longest-running animation festival in Western Canada — currently on its 17th installment.
We’ve watched a lot at the festival, and there’s still more to see. GIRAF has almost a hundred films screening this year, sourced from around the globe. So, as we continue to work through them, we thought we’d share five surprises with you. Three are freely available to watch — the other two are festival exclusives. None of them were on our radar before GIRAF, but all are worth checking out.
Enjoy!
The Midnight Sun (United States)
The Midnight Sun follows a woman who works as a fire lookout in California. The director, Connor Radding Bland of UCLA, handled all of the art and writing by himself. It’s 12 minutes long. You might expect a young filmmaker to buckle under that workload. In this case, you would be wrong.
This film is a haunting, mysterious journey into its protagonist. It immerses you in her world, and in her isolation, and in her memories — and it doesn’t let you go. She’s tired and miles away from anyone, trapped in beautifully lit and rendered forests. There’s a little Samurai Jack in the visuals, and plenty of Twin Peaks and Firewatch in the tone and concept, but Bland makes it his own.
The protagonist’s memories and imagination bleed seamlessly into the story. Bland uses this for striking moments — the cut from her past to her burner lighting, while unflashy, stands out to us every time. The Midnight Sun may only be a thesis film, but the filmmaking is absolutely there. It’s in the editing, and especially in the shot blocking and color design.
Because of his skill as a filmmaker, Bland weaves what could be just another psychological thriller into something much more powerful. The voice mixing is a bit spotty, and some of the drawings aren’t as polished as others, but the atmosphere and tension are so thick that these flaws don’t spoil the film. Bland never drops the other shoe, and yet you stay connected through the end.
During an interview published in January, Bland said that he’d stopped making films. He’s in the story department for the new God of War game now, and burned out on animation. “I’ll go back to short films when it’s time,” he said. We hope it’s time again soon.
Sororal (France)
By directors Frédéric Even and Louise Mercadier, Sororal is a film that you need to see to believe. It’s a 15-minute piece made with stop-motion puppetry. The beauty here is otherworldly.
Sororal follows three peasant sisters who live on a vast, flat plane. At the start, a traveler warns them that an apocalyptic wave is coming to claim them all. It’s unclear at first whether he’s telling the truth — but the sisters begin to experience strange events connected to the sea.
The stars of the show are the puppet and set designs, and the lighting, composition and animation. There’s a tactile, naturalistic, hyper-real feeling to the motion and screen presence of the puppets. No detail on them is left unattended — when one sister removes her sash, you can see that its red dye has lightly discolored her clothes underneath.
In an interview with Skwigly last year, Even and Mercadier said this about the creation of the puppets:
Faces were first modeled in 3D on Blender software. They were then printed with a 3D printer. They serve as models for the sculptors to create the faces of the three sisters and to make the molds. The puppets are made of resin. For their design, we were inspired by Gothic sculpture. We particularly liked how they represent the eyes in this period. Indeed, in the 12th century, French sculptors discovered Asian art and we can feel the influence of this discovery in their creation.
Like Jiří Trnka, the team doesn’t hide that the puppets are puppets. Mercadier and Even believe that “seeing the mouth replacement lines and the joints in their hands” actually brings us closer to the characters — even though we understand that they aren’t people. When you watch one of them remove a sheet from a clothesline in the wind, it looks and feels almost more real than a real actor.
The characters interact with each other in a similarly real way. Sororal’s main weakness, for us, is that its story leans a bit too far into an abstract, metaphorical direction to fully capitalize on the realism of its cast. But this is Even and Mercadier’s first professional film together. We can only be excited for what they do next.
Thorns and Fishbones (Hungary)
Plenty of animation attempts to be surreal, but it’s not easy to do. Even the well-made Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (2018), about surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, doesn’t quite land when it tries to portray surrealism itself. The logic feels obvious — it doesn’t seem like it came from the mind of an actual surrealist.
Thorns and Fishbones doesn’t have that problem. In fact, this 10-minute piece is one of the truest and most compelling surrealist films we’ve come across lately. A Portuguese artist studying animation in Budapest, Natália Azevedo Andrade, directed it as her graduation project. It’s at least as assured as The Midnight Sun, if not a bit more.
This is a hard film to describe. Most of it takes place in a few rooms, where a woman and three children live. Only, something is off. From the facial expressions to the dialogue, the characters feel oddly distant. The children tell themselves a strange and winding story about a rider. The front door is sealed shut by dead ivy, but whenever the children try to snap it off, the woman’s braided hair frays.
There’s a door in the back of the house — at one point, the woman walks into it and finds herself swimming through the ocean. She grabs a fish for dinner, which the children devour in sickening detail. Later, the back door begins to crack, and water flows into the house. And the house, for its part, sits in the middle of an empty wasteland.
The film is animated with a striking blend of 2D, stop-motion and live footage. Cartoon Saloon’s influence is clearly present in the character designs. Andrade and her animators do an admirable job with the motion — but the film’s one weak point is its cleanup, as some of the final drawings aren’t quite as accomplished as they could be. Still, the film looks very good.
It’s not clear what Thorns and Fishbones means, but it’s full of tension and memorable images — and it feels rich with meaning, just expressed in an abstract way. Like all great surrealism, pinning down what this film is doing isn’t straightforward. We’re duly impressed and looking forward to more from Andrade.
This one is a festival exclusive, so we’ve included the trailer below. It doesn’t do the film justice:
White Horse (China/UK)
White Horse comes from the Chinese animator Xu Yujie, who divides her time between Beijing and London. Seven minutes long, it’s evocative and enigmatic, resisting easy interpretation. Here’s how Xu describes it:
The film is using sand as the medium to depict the misunderstanding, ineffective communication and unobtainable feeling between individuals.
At its most basic, White Horse is about an accordion player chasing after a horse. There are many layers to it — and the emotional, sensory layer is the most powerful. You can sink into it. The visuals, the music and the delicacy of the film bring to mind The Diary of Tortov Roddle by Kunio Katō, which is a good thing.
But let’s backtrack — this is a sand film. Animating with sand is a huge task. Plus, the medium can sometimes lend itself to animation that’s primarily about how it was done with sand. White Horse rises to the challenge of this style, but also doesn’t use sand as a flex. While Xu’s work is extremely technically impressive, it’s not the star. She uses it to tell a story, much like Aleksandr Petrov uses paint on glass.
Xu’s technique is incredible, though — just look at the sequence where the man rides the horse, warping and distorting like ripples in water. She even uses sand for the type of traditional character animation you’d normally associate with 2D. All of it is full of life and texture. Her compositions are strong, too.
Like The Midnight Sun and Sororal, you can watch White Horse in its entirety on Vimeo:
Fall of the Ibis King (Ireland)
For us, Fall of the Ibis King has been one of the finds at GIRAF. It’s a 10-minute piece directed by Josh O’Caoimh and Mikai Geronimo, who made it as their graduation film. The result is one of the best animated shorts we’ve seen all year.
This film is raw intensity from the first second. It follows a theater performance and a disturbed actor in the troupe, whose bitterness toward the leads turns dangerous. But none of this is conveyed in an obvious way. The story is told out of order, and might even have multiple endings. As the pressure builds, we keep circling back around the same sets of images, some of which seem almost imaginary. It’s very Perfect Blue.
Visually, what O’Caoimh, Geronimo and their team have achieved here isn’t quite like any other animation we’ve seen. Like with Thorns and Fishbones, you can feel Cartoon Saloon’s influence, but Fall of the Ibis King only uses that studio’s work as a starting point. The colors, the design, the compositions — it’s all unique, painterly, beautiful and almost unbelievably cool.
The disturbed actor’s staring eyes, peeking through any gap they can find, are a motif. There’s a moment near the start when he watches the leads as they dance on stage — and the music, which is gorgeously done throughout, hits a sudden, Boards-of-Canada note of dark nostalgia. That moment alone is unlike anything we’ve seen, and we can’t stop thinking about it.
When an Irish outlet interviewed O’Caoimh and Geronimo in September, after Fall of the Ibis King premiered at the Venice Film Festival, they had this to say:
The most difficult part of making this film was that early on, before sound and colour were added, the animatic was impossible to follow. This made it difficult to get feedback and meant that the team who signed up to work with us were very trusting. We learnt to just be confident in the film we wanted to make and did our best.
We’re glad that they stayed with it. Even though we’ve seen Fall of the Ibis King multiple times, it keeps us on the edges of our seats. There’s a palpable dread as you watch — the entire film, you feel like something terrible is seconds away from happening.
O’Caoimh and Geronimo are still working together — they just did a short Halloween commission (Empty Little People) for RTÉjr. We’d never heard of them before GIRAF, but the duo has just jumped toward the top of our list of filmmakers to watch. We can’t wait to see what they do next.
Fall of the Ibis King isn’t available outside the festival circuit right now, so we’ve included the trailer below. As with Thorns and Fishbones, it doesn’t really do the film justice:
That’s all for today’s issue! Thanks for sticking with us. Your support continues to make all of this possible.
GIRAF has been a big focus of our time lately — we’re glad we could offer you a glimpse behind the scenes. These five films are just a few of the best we’ve seen. Many of our top picks are unmentioned here, including our favorites for the all-important Best Canadian Animated Short award. We’ll have more information for you in the coming weeks, once we’ve worked with the other jurors to select the winners.
Hope to see you again soon!
I wish folks outside of Canada could partake in the film festival! I'm salivating over Fall of the Ibis King in particular, especially with your detailed review. Slowly making my way through the ones you've noted are available more broadly—White Horse was gorgeous. What artists are doing with the medium continues to blow me away.