Cartoon Brew

As live-action films become more and more like cartoons — full of superhero heroics, True Romance-style teen melodrama, or slapstick situations that even Wile E. Coyote would find extreme — animated films are taking their inspiration more and more from real life.

At least, that’s the conclusion I reached after watching Best of the Ottawa Animation Festival 2008, a 70-minute compendium of notable short films from the largest animation showcase in North America. Rather than tell an invented fictional story, nearly all of these nine shorts incorporate documentary elements of some kind — found footage, audio interviews, personal anecdotes or stories from friends — which the filmmaker then improvises upon, if you can call the painstaking process of creating an animated film “improvisational.” The aesthetic here has more in common with Waltz With Bashir than Wall•E, and the best entries point the way toward a fruitful new direction for the animation genre.

Take Canadian directors Mike Maryniuk and Matt Rankin’s “Cattle Call,” for instance; it’s an explosive three-minute “pixilated documentary” about cattle auctioneers in which the images (some of it live auction footage shot by the filmmakers) zoom across the screen at the same relentless, superhuman speed as the syllables fly from the auctioneers’ mouths. It’s like Norman McLaren’s “Neighbours” on crystal meth... and wearing a cowboy hat.



Or “The Mixy Tapes,” a difficult-to-summarize exercise in high-speed deconstruction in which filmmaker David Seitz and musician Mike Wray can be heard on the soundtrack arguing heatedly over what approach they want the film to take — i.e., the very film we’re watching. David Seitz is keen on incorporating a grotesque, id-like infant named “Tumbles” into the mix, but Wray hates the idea; the result is that Tumbles is simultaneously part of the film and edited out of it, like Schrödinger’s cat. (Hey, I told you this one was hard to summarize.)



In “A Letter to Colleen,” co-director Andy London reads a letter he’s written to a girl he knew when he was a teenager; in it, he describes the disturbing events of his drug- and alcohol-fueled 18th birthday party. Meanwhile, we see those events recreated via grainy white-on-black rotoscope animation that makes the images seem both unreal and hyper-real — especially the recurring image of Colleen’s face, which retains the same blissed-out smile whether she’s shaving her head or vomiting onto the floor.

“It’s Always the Same Story” is a slight but charming teenaged anecdote, directed by Joris Clerté and Anne Morin, in which a Frenchman recalls sneaking off to see the steamy X-rated film Emmanuelle with a friend... only to have his father take him to see the exact same film the very next day to teach him about “the facts of life.” Less successful is Kara Nasdor-Jones’ “I Slept With Cookie Monster,” a woman’s account of her marriage to (and eventual escape from) a violent husband; the animation is uninspired and at only three minutes, it’s like a précis for a much longer, more dramatic film.

My favourites in the collection are the final two. Run Wrake’s breathless "The Control Master" uses ’50s and ’60s-era clip art, magazine ads, and snippets from comic books to tell a surreal, wordless story of a villain who grows into a giant, wrecks a city, then shrinks himself and nearly escapes on a butterfly before the hero and heroine finally capture him.

As for Dennis Tupicoff’s brilliant “Chainsaw” (which, sadly, I could not find a clip from online), it begins as an instructional film about chainsaw safety, morphs into an obituary for a renowned prize bull, then again into a biography of the renowned bullfighter Dominguin. But at its heart, it’s the story of a tragic love triangle between three people who on one level are an Australian lumberjack, his wife, and her lover, but who on another level are also Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and Dominguin. The connections holding the film together make very little sense on a literal level, but on the level of dream logic, “Chainsaw” feels perfectly straightforward — right up until the shocking ending, a horrifying yet poetic image no live action film could pull off anywhere near as deftly.