The most high-profile of this year's animated shorts is “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.” A half-hour adaptation of a popular children's book that features celebrity voices like Idris Elba and Tom Hollander, it was given a heavily promoted debut on Apple TV last year. It concerns a young boy, lost in a snowy landscape and looking for his home. He soon meets a talking mole, whom he quickly befriends. They are joined by a fox – who tries to eat the mole but becomes more hospitable after he's rescued from a snare – and a horse. The quartet soon form a family of sorts as they search for a place they can call home.
Apparently, “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” started as a series of images with inspiration quotes attached to them that illustrator Charlie Mackesy posted to Instagram. This explains a lot about the film. The short involves a quartet of vague, archetypal characters who wander towards a thinly explained goal, all while speaking exclusively in banal aphorisms about love, kindness, forgiveness, bravery, asking for help, and being “enough.” This feels less like a traditional narrative and more like a self-help book. The Boy acts as if he's recovering from some sort of trauma but it's never expounded on. It's all very vague and touchy feely. Seeing such ponderous dialogue come out of the mouths of a cartoon mole or a Christopher Robin look-a-like quickly gets old.
It's very nice to look at, as the painterly quality of Mackesy's original artwork is extended to this adaptation. I especially like how the illustrator lines are frequently left in, giving the entire film a nicely sketchy and hand-made quality. Yet there's just not much here on a narrative level and the attempts to add pathos and meaning in such a heavy-handed manner makes something likelier to cause my eyes to roll than my heart to swell. [5/10]
The required quirky Canadian short of this year’s batch of animation is “The Flying Sailor.” It is inspired by the Halifax Explosion, an incident in 1917, where a French ship hulling explosives collided in the Halifax, Nova Scotia harbor with a Norwegian vessel. The resulting blast – the biggest man-caused explosion up to that point – completely destroyed Halifax and the nearby town of Dartmouth. 1782 people were killed. Among the survivors was Charlie Mayers, a British sailor who was tossed four kilometers into the air by the explosion. He miraculously survived, left totally stripped by his flight into the sky save for his boots.
“The Flying Sailor” doesn’t tell you any of these things, as it’s free of dialogue. It begins with jaunty music and a cartoonish zoom into the interior of the French boat. The image of the broad sailor walking along the dock made me think this was some sort of homage to thirties animation, before the explosion begins suddenly. The resulting montage of chaotic noise and motion is chaotic, before the film focuses on the strangely serene image of this naked, burly fellow with a mermaid tattooed on his chest launched into the air. His life flashes before his eyes as he sails up towards the edge of space before plummeting back down to the ground.
The result is surprisingly touching. The short seemingly combines traditional animation with photography tricks and stop-motion, creating an interesting visual effect. The contrast between the rough-and-tumble sailor and the seeming peace he feels as he flies through the heavens is intriguing. The montage of images, from his childhood and early days as a sailor and bar room fights, is further contrasted with peaceful music. As a visual experience, “The Flying Sailor” is impressive. As a short rumination on life and near-death experiences, it’s quietly touching. [7/10]
A Portuguese short, “Ice Merchants” follows a father and son who live in a house precariously perched on the edge of a steep cliff. The duo parachute down to the village below every day, where they sell the ice made possible by the chilly temperatures of their home's high elevation. In the evening, they ride a motorcycle-powered pulley back up to their house, fill the ice box with water, and do it all over again the next day. That is until rising temperatures threaten not just their business but also their lives.
If nothing else, “Ice Merchants” looks cool. The short, at least, partially seems to be an experiment in perspective. As the father and son sail down the mountain side, the point-of-view swirls around their bodies as they free-fall towards the ground. I also like how their hats fly off their head, loving caressing against each other as they float up through the air. There's other neat touches like that, in scenes like the boy on a swing set over the ledge of the porch. The entire short has a muted color palette too, heavy on the shading and soft colors, that provides a distinctive visual look.
I wish I responded to “Ice Merchants'” story as much as I did its appearance though. I had to think about the ending, especially a seemingly supernatural touch that is introduced without much overture, before I understood it. I suppose this is a short about climate change and grieving, the latter of which is conveyed a bit too subtly. I was much more interested in the particularities of how this ice merchant came to live in such a dangerous home and why he has to perform his job this way. It seems to me that there's an interesting world contained in this cartoon that is stubbornly kept from us, the viewer, in order to focus on vaguer, more dream-like ideas. An example of ambition perhaps getting in the way of execution. [6/10]
The amusingly entitled “My Year of Dicks” follows Pam, a fifteen year old girl living in mid-nineties Houston and her attempts to loose her virginity over the course of a summer. Broken into five chapters, each episode recounts a different encounter with a different boy. “The Vampire” sees her trying to seduce a goth-y skateboarding bro at a party. “Un Gran Penis” has her battling her inner desires while trying to hook up with a hunky usher at an arthouse movie theater. “The Sweet One” covers a date at a carnival with a considerate guy and her male best friend, whom her date is more interested in. “The Horror Show” sees Pam meeting a pontificating straight-edge punk at a sketchy party. Finally, in “The Sex Talk,” her parents discover Pam's goal and attempt to educate her on the realities of intercourse.
Because I remain an eternally awkward, perpetually horny teenager in my brain, I found a lot to relate to in “My Year of Dicks.” Pam wants to think of herself as a mature young woman. She watches “Henry and June” behind her parents' backs. She imagines elaborate dialogues with herself, thinking a lot about her feelings and the gravity of these events. Yet the truth of the matter is, she's a gawky teenager who is ruled by the whims of her hormones and the spontaneity of youth. Every attempt to establish herself as an edgy adult goes horribly wrong. The goth boy she wants to fuck is a making a childish bet to make-out with as many girls as possible. Her carnival date exposes her as a flighty girl. Her attempts to be mature at a grown-up party ends with her ride getting carried away by an overprotective mother. Pam wants to grow up but her life is ruled by the inequities of adolescence. This is most evident in the last chapter, where her dad's terrible sex advice causes Pam is just about crawl out of her own skin from discomfort.
Of course, things have a way of working out how they're suppose to, no matter what our young minds hope for. The title has an obvious double meaning. What Pam hopes will be a year of dicks, referring to a variety of male members, turns out to be one failed date after another with different varieties of jerks. Each guy she attempts to mate with is either a manipulative douchebag just looking to get laid or lying about his intentions. There's lots of laughs and a little bit of pathos in seeing this come to pass, especially a monologue about the straight-edger she nearly bangs on a dirty carpet. As is all to often the case with our young minds, the best option to loose her virginity to is right in front of her the whole time, a conclusion that is obvious but watching it play out is satisfying.
Tying “My Year of Dicks” together is an inventive visual style. The film combines retroscope animation over live-action actors with more elaborate flights of fancy. Each chapter is done in a different style. “The Vampire” features lots of flowery expressions over its characters. The second episode concerns figments of Pam's imagination talking to her. “The Sweet One” features anime-style bursts of enthusiasm. While “The Horror Show” has some nicely demonic style bursts to it. I found myself relating to and enjoying the observations “My Year of Dicks” makes, as well as the colorful animation used to bring it to life. Easily my favorite of this year's crop of animated shorts. [7/10]
This year's token stop-motion short takes an especially meta approach to the medium. The verbosely entitled “An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It” follows Neil, a lowly office employee, attempting to sell fancy toasters over the phone. (A job he's not very good at.) One night, he encounters an ostrich in the building's elevator, who informs that he's living in a giant lie. This wakes the man up, to the seemingly artificial nature of the reality he and everyone around him inhabits. He struggles to convince others of this.
A stop-motion puppet realizing he's a cartoon character is a pretty good metaphor for someone waking up to the subjective nature of reality. “An Ostrich” depicts its meta conceit in a clever way. Most of the short is shown to us through the aperture of a stop-motion camera. We see the green screen behind the sets and the hands of the animator moving the figures in-between the shots. Essentially, “An Ostrich” plays out as an animated short as well as its own behind-the-scenes, making-of feature. It's only when Neil escapes the simulated nature of his own reality that the camera pulls back to a more traditional aspect ratio, visually conveying the idea of its character escaping the constraints of his life.
Unfortunately, that's about the only really clever idea this one has. I'm surprised to see someone using a dull office job as a symbol of crushing, banal conformity in 2022, a storytelling cliché that hasn't been fresh since “The Matrix” was first in theaters. The eventual reveal of what kind of cartoon Neil is in also feels like a disappointing, not to mention abrupt, conclusion to the story, instead of a natural exploration of its ideas. I wish this short embraced the existential dread of its protagonist realizing he's living in a simulation – best represented by scenes of the interchangeable stop-motion faces falling off – instead of just making a tired point about how much office jobs suck. Lots of potential here that never amounts to anything fully satisfying. [6/10]
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