Ottawa International Animation Festival 2011
27 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Ottawa International Animation Festival Tags: OIAF, Ottawa International Animation Festival
This year the Ottawa International Animation Festival celebrates its 35th anniversary. Wednesday night (Sep 21st) kicked it off (for me) at the Bytowne with Shorts Competition 1. After almost twenty minutes of introductions and speeches (I found out who represents my riding) the lights went down. They didn’t stay down though, because many of the creators of the films were in attendance and stood to be recognized after their films showed.
I’ll preface my next statement with the fact that I generally groan when I hear a short will be experimental. This is because I’ve been burned too many times with overwrought and non-original bizarreness in the past. Which makes it even more noteworthy that the best short of the night for me was an experimental piece by the title Many Go Round from Japan. It is hard to describe other then to say that paper cut outs showing people walking, climbing, falling in many different ways are shown and gradually altered to give an awesome visual experience.
An interesting note/warning for creators. The Pig Farmer was rollicking zaniness. I was struck by the brief view of the twin towers being hit and how that image ranks up there with the Holocaust, for historical images that have power and creators must be careful including them, lest their creation not be able to support the weight of emotions such an image brings. Long have I seen people clumsily grasp Holocaust imagery and have their whole production fall under a weight their production can not support.
Two more that I’d rank just below “Many Go Round” are “Swimming Pool” and “Microphobia“. Swimming Pool was a very imaginative look at two people who have good reason to be cautious of daytime swimming, but when they both sneak a late night swim, find each other. Done in a very sketchy cartoon style, I loved the look. “Microphobia” is a great example of what a certain genrea of short can be. I don’t quite know what to call it, but there is definitely a catagory of experimental short, that involve geometric shapes changing and merging from one to another, a kind of kinetic doodle. In this case the shapes were formed with organic looking pieces that looked like they came from bits of life in a biology microscope lab.
Two more that were quite good were Chroniques de la poisse (Sticky Ends) and quite surprising to me (given my distate for advertisments) The Chase a promo for Intel. Sticky Ends, done in a cartoony jagged style, flitted from person and witnessed their unfortunate demise. It was really quite funny though, just trust me. The Chase was supposed to be a promo for Intel, but what really captured me was the different mediums and styles used (as the characters jumped in and out of every window on a computer, from Youtube videos to Facebook to office software.
A final honorable mention goes to Animal Kingdom. A fox, a racoon and a bear watch nature televesion shows. They start out as human-like behaviors but the fox starts to regress as the viewing goes on. A simple joke, but I liked it.
