2017 Ottawa International Animation Festival
21 countries, 67 shorts, 3 features, 48 hours.
I’ve just returned from my ninth Ottawa International Animation Festival since 1998, and my first since 2010. I only got a weekend pass this time, rather than doing the full five days, but I still managed to cram in 10 screenings. This is also the first time I’ve attended the fest by myself, which enabled me to document it in greater detail than I have in the past. What follows are my notes on nearly all of the films in this year’s competition, with links to trailers (or full films) whenever possible, and embedded videos of my favorites.
Short Film Competition Stats
There were just slightly more films on the lower half of my rating scale, but it’s worth noting that more films received very high ratings (four to five stars) than very low ratings (less than two stars).
| Rating | Film Count |
|---|---|
| 0 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 13 | |
| 16 | |
| 13 | |
| 6 | |
| 10 | |
| 0 | |
| 1 |
Ratings averaged about the same across the four categories, with the Student category faring better than usual thanks to a bump from the excellent Garden Party.
| Category | Film Count | Avg. Rating |
|---|---|---|
| All | 64 | |
| Narrative | 26 | |
| Non-Narrative | 14 | |
| Student | 7 | |
| Commissioned | 17 |
Breaking the ratings down by country gets a bit more interesting. Bolstered by the only film with a perfect score, France had the strongest showing. China’s and Japan’s low rungs on the ladder highlight my ongoing difficulty connecting with East Asia’s cultural exports.
| Country | Film Count | Avg. Rating |
|---|---|---|
| France | 5 | |
| Sweden | 1 | |
| Norway | 1 | |
| USA | 18 | |
| Germany | 6 | |
| Netherlands | 5 | |
| South Korea | 2 | |
| Turkey | 1 | |
| Estonia | 1 | |
| Canada | 11 | |
| UK | 7 | |
| Croatia | 3 | |
| Spain | 1 | |
| South Africa | 1 | |
| Mexico | 1 | |
| India | 1 | |
| Belgium | 1 | |
| Japan | 5 | |
| China | 4 | |
| Switzerland | 3 | |
| Australia | 1 |
Hi Stranger
A creepy little naked figure serenely expresses its affection for you. Transcends the assumed irony to become a somewhat touching, universal affirmation.
Spring Time: Old Man
The song is great. The handmade visual accompaniment—kind of a naive psychedelia—is busy to a fault. One gets the sense there’s a fairly uncomplicated meaning intended in all this, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what it is.
Negative Space
A young man’s story of bonding with his father over efficiently packing luggage. My strong identification with this film was almost certainly heightened by seeing it the day after the anniversary of my own father’s death, but regardless, this is the kind of film I come to Ottawa hoping to see. Magnificent character design and set design, beautifully expressive stop-motion animation, and a simple, open-hearted concept executed flawlessly. I think they could have taken it a bit further, but this is basically perfect.
El Jimador: ID
A cute, quick ad for tequila with a simple joke that works. Decent stop-motion with a Day of the Dead-themed visual basis that can’t go wrong.
Any Road
A game of pong undergoes a transformation into a series of controlled visual glitches. Its dynamic, postmodern classical score is fantastic, and the non-objective images and transformations generated are a visual feast, though not consistently so.
In One Drag
Cigarette butts band together for revenge, making the smoker the smokee. A fun mix of pixillation, stop-motion, and digital trickery, but as someone who is eternally and intensely irked by smokers’ cavalier litter, I kind of wanted the film to make a little more of a statement.
Boogie Stomp Pink
The screen is split in 24 segments, each displaying the same dance routine, slowly phasing out of sync with one another, Steve Reich-style. After employing a few different visual ideas early on, it settles into a groove that gets repetitive, but its rhythms are never boring, and there’s plenty to look at.
Ugly
A misshapen cat at the bottom of the food chain befriends a kindly Native American man. I can’t say enough good things about the 3D visuals, defined by creative use of a low polygon count and a gorgeous palette of magic-hour pastels.
Mimi
A mother’s amusing tales of how much harder her generation had it as kids in China. As an illustration of her recorded dialogue, the animation is cute but mostly superfluous.
Mind Frame
Like a non-rectilinear sliding puzzle made up of dozens of eyes, ears, mouths, noses, and hands. Feels like an obsessive notebook doodle come to life.
Tesla: Lumiére Mondiale (The Tesla World Light)
Nicola Tesla begs J.P. Morgan for money and somehow manages to fall in love with a pigeon. Viscerally overwhelming, synthesizing Tesla’s obsession and the terrifying essence of electricity.
Lo
Lo-fi digital renderings of conflicts between snakes, cats, and other animals. Highly saturated colors on black, reminiscent of something that might have been created on the Amiga or Commodore 64. Not much to hold onto though.
Yokoso Bokudesu 4
A song and dance bursting with joy about the virtues of self-induced isolation, followed by more songs about… I don’t know. This is an Eastern flavor of cute I just don’t understand. I eventually gave up trying to parse it.
Naked Island: We Drink Too Much
A dignified pair of pigeons discovers they are no good with money and they have a drinking problem. A quick hit good for a chuckle and not much more.
Beautiful Like Elsewhere
Alas, less than a day later, I don’t remember enough about this one to comment on it.
Wednesday with Goddard
A quest to find God. Lots to love here: the tone that balances a kind of whimsy with existential gravitas, and wow, the look of it. A winning contrast between geometric character design, richly toned graphite drawings, and flat, alternating background colors drawing from a distinctive palette.
Short Film Competition 2
Casino
Colorful, gestural casino imagery moving in time with an energetic jazz trio. I’m always impressed when a piece that requires this much planning and time-consuming production can come off looking spontaneous. Greater than the sum of its parts.
Lotus Lantern
A nicely arranged assortment of Chinese cultural signifiers that don’t mean anything to me. Apparently I know even less about China than I thought.
E001 Kotkin
A commercial for a Freitag bag, highlighting its compostability with a time lapse of its decay. It gets the point across just fine, but neither its concept nor its execution is very inspiring.
The Full Story
Visiting his recently-emptied childhood home triggers a man’s memories of his parents’ divorce. Nice combination of cut-out, stop-motion, and live-action techniques. I’m not sure if there was a system governing the hows and whys of which of those forms the characters took in different situations, but I like the idea of that.
Airport
The sights and sounds of air travel, in all its hair-pulling glory. It captures the experience, but I’m not sure I see the value in having that experience absent the need to.
Naked Island: Simulated Life
The best of the Naked Island series in competition, and, not coincidentally, the only one that doesn’t feature pigeons. Its message of getting away from your devices and experiencing the real world is a more cheerful, bite-size take on Black Mirror’s Luddite cynicism. Trite, but creative in its depiction of our devices’ escalating demands for our attention.
Mark Lotterman: Happy
Prismatic geese dance to a song about the mistakes we make trying to escape modern ennui. Apart from their synchronicity, there’s no ostensible thematic link between the images and the music, but they dovetail so well it’s hard to imagine one without the other. I couldn’t look away.
Maacher Jhol (The Fish Curry)
A young man comes out to his father over some homemade fish curry. Based on the attention paid to the details of the recipe, there’s subtext I’m missing. I’m not desperate for films to neatly resolve, but I wish more filmmakers employing open endings were better at making them actual endings. I also found it interesting that the opening titles took pains to make it clear that this film is not autobiographical.
Power
A collection of Rube Goldberg machines slowly reveal they’re not operating as independently as it first appears. Magnificent.
Sog
The cries of fish stuck in trees attract the attention of a nearby community of cave dwellers, who do not respond charitably. In the current political climate, it’s hard not to see these literal fish out of water terrorized by natives as a metaphor for refugee aid.
Min Börda (The Burden)
Four stop-motion musical numbers about existential dread and naive optimism. Wonderfully executed in all respects. This was the last film in my last screening, and it was a great way to wrap up the festival.
Short Film Competition 3
Persistence of Vision III
Effectively turns a cathedral facade into a zoetrope and sets it to music, with the statuary providing the percussion. Jaw-droppingly inventive.
A Photo of Me
A boy watches the old film noir D.O.A. with his family. That’s pretty much it. Half or more of the runtime is literally just badly-cropped footage from D.O.A., a movie I like a lot more than this one.
The Luyas: Says You
A music video in which a woman wanders through the desert amid rhythmically pulsating succulents, with dehydration-fueled halucinations soon setting in. Enjoyable enough, but not very memorable.
The Adventure of Liangliang
Its skeumorphic pop-up book and paper sculpture conceits caught my attention early on, but they couldn’t overcome the generally impenetrable thematic and narrative murk, which far outlasted my patience.
Honda: Utility
A Russian doll effect of the camera swooping into Honda hatchbacks to reveal an array of different environments in which said hatchbacks might be enjoyed. It’s a smart concept and well-executed, but not enough to get me excited about a car commercial.
The Battle of San Romano
Briefly brings the Paolo Uccello paintings to cartoonish life. It kind of reminds me of The Mill and the Cross, which essentially did the same thing, except with Bruegel, Rutger Hauer, and a feature length.
Decorado
A bear becomes convinced his life and surroundings are a fabrication, á la The Truman Show. It effectively emulates the pitch and logic of a fever dream, something about its look and tone recall Tony Millionaire, and some of its vignettes are funny, but its surrealism was too disjointed for me.
Naked Island: We Eat Shit
In which our hapless pigeon heroes lower their dietary standards. Easily the least of the Naked Island series in competition.
Lovestreams
Two people fall in love via instant message in the early aughts and discover they don’t know how to proceed or what to expect from each other. It’s a clever visualization of fantasy’s fragility in the face of reality, but it’s a touch too hokey for me.
El Tryptophan: Insect Express
Fractals and fuzzy geometric shapes contort and melt atop instrumental drone rock. Basically an old-school laser light show, probably best viewed with the aid of perception-altering substances.
Grid Corrections
Animated intersections from hundreds (thousands?) of satellite photos, presumably sourced from Google Maps via a clever algorithm. Stunning.
Riot
It’s hard to make an assessment of this one because no subtitles were provided for its French narration. It seems to be drawing parallels between dance and social unrest provoked by racism.
BIFAN 2017: Leader Film
A bumper for a fantasy film festival consisting of silhouetted men and wolves running through a parking lot and up a building wall before exploding into a bubbling mass of competing colors. Its multiplanar cutouts look nice, but it tries to do too much, and it seems like it would be wearying to have to watch it in front of every screening at the fest.
End of Recording
This is another one that didn’t stay with me long enough to be able to comment. Something about LSD.
More
The kids are having the best day ever as the donkey farts out balloon after balloon. A quick slab of deliriously morbid humour for fans of Don Hertzfeldt and Nicholas Gurewitch.
Short Film Competition 4
Pheromone
Giant worms converge in writhing, orgiastic masses. Saturated, slick, mesmerizing.
Cloacinae
A series of puppets with pennies for heads navigate a sewer and observe an assortment of muck congealing and separating. Clearly made by devotees of the Brothers Quay, and I enjoyed it as I would one of the Quays’ films—that is, quite a bit, and from an intellectual distance. For adventurous audiences only.
Koto no Shidai (The State of Things)
A video for a Japanese hip-hop song about language, comprised of wriggling, wormy forms that occasionally coalesce into letterforms. I like the song, and I suspect the imagery is effective for people who can read Japanese, but I can’t, and the subtitles couldn’t make up the difference.
My Father’s Room
An examination of a girl’s distance from her alcoholic father and her fantasies of being rid of him. Propelled by a cardboard box motif that serves multiple symbolic functions and a consumingly somber tone that stops short of maudlin.
Spank Shot
Impressionistic rotoscoping of various sports. Looks nice, but it’s mostly empty calories, and the soundtrack feels compulsory.
Garden Party
As several species of frog explore an opulent, abandoned home, the fate of its owner comes into focus. Exquisite CGI and perfect pacing. I do think it missed some more interesting narrative opportunities, but this is still top shelf stuff. I’m amazed it’s a student film.
Nos Faltan (Missing)
A tribute to the dozens of students who disappered from Iguala, Mexico in 2014. It’s an effective political statement, and I feel bad calling it corny, but….
My Momma Is Bossies (My Mum’s Bonkers)
A lyrical ode to the filmmaker’s passionate mother. The sentiment is nice, and I get that it’s aimed at capturing the woman’s essence, but as a tribute, it feels a bit perfunctory.
Spectacle of the Real
Perhaps the most visually stunning film in competition (I gasped audibly at its opening frames), diminished a bit by its narrator’s iffy musings on human potential. As pure eye candy, though, its synthesis of form, fluidity, and eye-popping color are extraordinary. I kind of wonder if this is the sort of thing Alex Steinweiss would be doing if he were born a couple generations later.
Rabbit’s Blood
A girl is clued into the motivation for her friend’s suicide by a strange rabbit. Reminiscent of the spare visual style and allegorical absurdism of Estonian animation, but no allegory is evident, and the bit of coherence it teases is abandoned in an unsatisfyingly abrupt ending.
Big Surf
A chronicle of the poor planning that led to a catastrophic dam failure in California in the 1920s. I’d like to learn more about the event, but I didn’t find this telling of the story engaging.
Link
Two people are linked at the head by their hair, and they have different ideas about how to spend their time. A novel take on a 101 conflict, and its flat, sketchy colors are nice, but its resolution is underwhelming.
Short Film Competition 5
Jay-Z: The Story of O.J.
This Jay-Z video appropriates the visuals of old racist cartoons, much as African Americans have done with the N word. A fitting accompaniment to the song’s haunting refrain, “Light nigga, dark nigga, faux nigga, real nigga / Rich nigga, poor nigga, house nigga, field nigga / Still nigga, still nigga.”
Manivald
An adult fox, his domineering mother, and a plumber form an amusing and slightly poignant love triangle. Solidly executed throughout, though the look—Bojack Horseman by way of Eastern Europe—isn’t entirely for me.
Kötü Kiz (Wicked Girl)
A little girl introduces us to the various elements of her fanciful world, including her abusive grandfather. Does an okay job of subverting the “child’s cutesy view of the adult world” trope; its oft-moving camera and the colorful lines of its hand-drawn frames make for a good evocation of a child’s point of view.
Toer (Tour)
Ink wash rotoscopes of bicycle races. Mercifully brief.
Life Cycles
Rotoscoped, first-person perspective of the filmmaker’s repetitive and banal daily routine, made up entirely of jump cuts, peppered with glimpses of the escalating 2016 crisis in Syria. I guess the idea is something about wealthy nations’ comfortable ruts and our complicity in the suffering happening elsewhere in the world, which is fine, but it doesn’t quite espouse the mundane dread that seems to be intended.
Kakera (Fragments)
A pair of imps have a mirror that turns the observers’ reflections into various grotesqueries. Interesting idea, and I like the spare guitar score, but the fuzzy pencil-test aesthetic (in lieu of something more polished) is pretty unappealing.
HAFF 2017: Leader Film
Having a bumper film for an animation festival in competition at another animation festival reinforces how insular and overtly self-referential the animation world can be. This one has some textural circles quivering along with nondescript buzzy frequencies. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, but I probably wouldn’t have invited it in the first place. This review is now longer than the film.
Only Lovers Leave to Die
Various conversations in various languages are heard over chaotic and colorful cycles of Jackson Pollock-style splatters. The textures are nice, but they get old fast, and the whole thing goes on way too long for something lacking any remotely discernible goal.
Six God Alphabet Peter
Six brightly colored, smiling faces demand that the titular Peter repeat the alphabet over and over, faster and faster. When it’s done well, I usually go for this kind of thing—it’s a form of comedy that values the timing more than the content—but this one felt too self-consciously WTF to me.
Strange Fish
My favorite film in this screening. Something about the shape and movement of its spontaneous lines really appeals to me. Its seemingly random numbers remind me of Shellac’s “New Number Order.”
Four Faces of the Moon
Interesting personal journey through family, ancestry, and the oppression of indigenous people. A bit hard to follow, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but after a long day, it didn’t compel my commitment as much as it might have. Nice juxtaposition of impressionistic storytelling with representational puppet animation. It’ll probably fare better on a second viewing.
Naked Island: Saint-Louis Square
This time, the pigeons are terrorized by a toddler and an owl. As with the others, bravo for recognizing brevity as the soul of wit, and it’s not unfunny, but it’s not ha-ha funny either.
Washed Out: Hard to Say Goodbye
A music video for an innocuous electropop tune in which a rotoscoped guy wanders around the city. Not much here.
Feature Film Competition
I could only fit three of the five features into my schedule. Incredibly, the other two—Lu Over the Wall and Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, the latter of which took the grand prize—both have the same director, Masaaki Yuasa.
My Dogs: Jinjin and Akida
A young boy tries to find his place in his adopted dysfunctional family. Plenty of subtext about the effects of Westernization and rapid economic development in South Korea in the early 1980s, but this is more about family dynamics amid alcoholism, and its observations feel true, though I wish it did more showing and less telling.
Torrey Pines
A girl entering adolescence grapples with her emerging queer identity and tries to survive a road trip with her unstable mother. It’s a nice little coming-of-age memoir, but not little enough. I think this would have worked better as a short. The effort spent establishing environs dwarfs the loose plotting and character-building that take place there, and the commitment to non-verbal narrative further limits the film’s ability to tell a personal story. With a few exceptions, its early-’90s pop-cultural signposts don’t reveal much about this particular kid: she was disgusted by the idea of becoming a woman, yes, but we see more of her watching the same TV shows, listening to the same music, and playing the same Gameboy as her peers. She goes past relatable and becomes almost generic.\n Regardless of my quibbles, I applaud Peterson’s efforts, and hope the overlap between animation and queer cinema continues to grow.
I’ll Just Live in Bando
A middle-aged drama professor faces a choice between a stable teaching career and a chance at his dream of being an actor. As his bad luck piles up, what began as a mild-mannered drama escalates into a complex and rather stressful thriller, without sacrificing much verisimilitude. One of the more interesting takes I’ve seen on the hell of responsibility.
Non-Competition Highlights
I only saw two non-competition screenings: a tribute to the Folimage studio and a selection of shorts preoccupied with death. My favorites are below.
The Sense of Touch
A couple navigates the ups and downs of falling in love via sign language and dance, with a look that evokes Toulouse-Lautrec. Pretty captivating.
Beach Flags
Young Iranian women compete to represent their country in a lifeguard competition. Without being dour, it focuses on the obstacles Iranian girls face when coming of age, and I love its design and quality of motion.
The Jump
A pair of kids explores the past lives of souls that are floating by. The kind of film I’d like to see more of: using animation not just because it’s available but because no other method could do the story justice, and with a visual sophistication capable of making a fairly abstruse concept broadly accessible. It communicates a lot in under three minutes. Beautiful.