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Short animation program at the 35 MM cinema

From August 21, for two weeks in the small hall of the 35 MM cinema, the cartoon program “Short Circuit” is shown for two sessions a day. It was prepared by the organizers of the festival of experimental animation and media art Linoleum, who over the past year showed the combined programs “Heat in the City” and “Stopping Breathing” in the same cinema. As before, as now, there is little experimental in the program compiled by Linoleum; rather, there is a noticeable interest in already known computer technologies. But it’s still impossible to recommend it to all fans of computer animation. And not because there is something complex in it and not accessible to everyone, but because it is composed very unevenly and stupidly, and there are not enough films that are really worth seeing. However, if you don’t mind spending a little over an hour in order to, among other things, watch a couple of short films that are already collecting festival prizes with might and main, I’ll tell you what’s in store for you.

Firstly, "Bernie the Doll" by the Frenchman Yann Jay and "Moran" by the Croatian Simon Bogojevic-Narat - three-dimensional dystopias, both received a special mention at the last Annecy festival. The hero of the first picture is big-headed Bernie, a “little man” working on an assembly line in a scary urban world. A clanging, dirty, black-and-white, soulless world always works especially well for artists who work with 3D animation. As for the people and the story itself, everything looks much more secondary here: Bernie is lonely, denying himself everything, he buys a woman’s living body at a TV sale, then buys arms and legs for it, and when he forks out for his head, the complete girl runs away from him . “Morana” is a less intelligible story, but also not striking in its originality. Here two worlds echo and intersect. On the one hand, there is a certain ancient world, the hero of which, covered in war paint, is running somewhere, accompanied by crowds of monstrous two-legged animals, and in particular a two-legged flying dog (apparently, in connection with this, the film received its name - after the Slavic goddess of evil and death ). And on the other hand, there is a catastrophic world of the future with an incessant war, where the same hero appears in the form of a frightened clerk running to God knows where.

“The Final Stop” by Canadian Trevor Cawood can also be considered interesting, where each person, filmed using the feature film technique, is silently accompanied by some huge creature like a statue, a giant wheel or a poster stand. The hero of the film goes crazy and gets hit by a bus from the constant presence of his spy, who looks like a figure made of concrete cylinders. Well, the monster immediately moves on to someone else.

Further in the program there will be not very expressive clips, fragmentary screensavers, abstract computer drawing with sentimental text on behalf of a girl who died of leukemia, transformations of baroque painting and a Japanese-Canadian-American plot filmed using photography, where the main thing is flowers and figures resulting from fixation flickering bright light. The films from the “Short Circuit” program use the enormous opportunities that digital animation provides so inventively that you can’t help but think: the plotless films with their plastic incomprehensibility and dull transformations of forms would sooner end and some kind of story, even the most ordinary one, would begin. (This, it must be said, is also to blame for the not very good quality of the projection, which extinguishes the colors and blurs the texture, which is like death for films that focus on pure imagery.)

However, if you are a staunch fan of modern animation and are ready to endure hardships just to be aware of its current life, go to “Short Circuit”; there are still no other opportunities to see fresh foreign short films in Moscow now. Well, in October the organizers of “Linoleum” promise a big festival, and hopefully the animation will look better at it.

Dina GODER