One of the pleasures of film festivals, whether you're watching them or organizing them, is in discovering unintended themes in the films. Sometimes it's inevitable, such as when social or political issues are on everyone's mind, but these are so unsurprising as to almost be banal. It's the small, quirky and sometimes trivial themes that are the most interesting to discover, and this year's award-winning short animation offerings from the
Japan Media Arts Festival has a few worth mentioning.
One thing I look forward to in any compilation is when people take a backward step, especially when it comes to CGI. There's such a tendency to lard on the detail, be it photorealistic or natural-media or whatever, that few make the deliberate choice to step back and pare things down.
This year three films made a point of dialing down the detail, each in different ways. Youhei Murakoshi's
Blockman goes the furthest. The viewer peers through a telescope to a strange world where everything is made up of identically sized cubes. Some are black, most are white, some make larger blocks, and some of the larger blocks have faces, courtesy of dots or lines on individual blocks. The curious lifeforms walk, fly, float, combine and come apart in a variety of ways, with the telescope lazily floating from one vista to another. The effect is similar to that of the even more minimalist
Dice—an earlier Japan Media Arts Festival honoree—but perhaps more mesmerizing.
Sejiro Kubo, Ichiro Tanida and Katsunori Aoki collaborated on
Copet, a series of shorts starring a cast of animals that are all straight lines and simple curves, plugged together like deranged Lego. At first glance it's appallingly cute, but little touches like camera shake and nifty bits of business (like a gorilla who repeatedly shivers himself out of a stupor) are at odds with the simplistic motion, and the tension works. But what really kept my attention were the bits that didn't follow the simple-is-better formula, like an erupting volcano, a meteor streaking toward Earth and water that looks, well, watery. The characters' occcasional forays into the live-action world, along with incomprehensible but still amusing storylines were also bonuses. If you can read Japanese you can check out the
Copet website, which goes into the shorts' world in considerable depth and pimps
Copet merch, including a DVD.
Hiroshi Chida's
Boneheads was produced by
Polygon Pictures, which I mention because it shares a certain aesthetic sensibility with Polygon's
Polygon Family shorts, in which the characters' blockiness is celebrated, rather than smoothed and textured to death. But
Polygon Family is mostly monochrome, whereas
Boneheads' colour pops with Day-Glo intensity. The latter's characters are also every so slightly asymmetrical, which just makes them kookier.
Moreover, where
Polygon Family's animated used the anime and fighting videogame idioms,
Boneheads is pure, non-stop Tex Avery-style mania (it's running time of seven minutes makes it even more reminiscent of a Golden Age cartoon). Roccos and Bone are two primitive creatures fighting over bananas—between themselves, and between other critters who get wind of the tasty fruit (or them). The whole thing is really just an escalating chase scene, but as every
Blues Brothers fan knows, that's not really a bad thing. Radar Cartoons reps Polygon in the U.S., and
Boneheads was produced for Viacom, so here's hoping that it pops up on our screens soon.
[Cross-posted from
Frames Per Second.]
Labels: animation, anime, CGI, festivals, Frames Per Second, Hiroshi Chida, Ichiro Tanida, Japan, Japan Media Arts Festival, Katsunori Aoki, Polygon Pictures, Sejiro Kubo, shorts, Youhei Murakoshi
Ryu Kato's 
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