LUCIDMEDIA

Animation Domination at TIFF

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Thursday, 10 September 2009 13:47

The National Film Board of Canada will be showing seven films as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. As if to complement the recent online archiving of NFB films online this past spring, six of the seven films are thirty minutes or under. Two of the works, The Spine by Oscar-winning director Chris Landreth, and Runaway Train, by Cordell Barker (best-known as the man behind the beloved NFB classic The Cat Came Back) were featured this past May at the Cannes Film Festival, and embrace the NFB’s history as a hotbed of creative animation. Each is notable for a visually arresting, zany style used to tell simple tales of, respectively, domestic strife and mechanical failure.

The Spine, which was produced by the NFB in association with Copperheart Animation and C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, tells the story of a depressed man, who is caught in a scarily co-dependent marriage. Director Landreth won a raft of international honours, including an Oscar, for his 2004 film Ryan, about Ryan Larkin, the former NFB animator. He shows his surreal style once again, using human bodies as visual metaphors for their psychological states.

The Spine opens with the words “Why am I here?” echoing like a mantra, as the audience is made privy to the inner thoughts of couples attending a counselling session to deal with their co-dependency issues. Landreth’s visual inventiveness makes itself known immediately: one figure is cobbled together from knobs and pieces of wood, while another couple have faces like a jigsaw puzzle, with twisted pieces missing or poking out. The counsellor himself is actually composed out of a hand, his head on the middle finger. It’s an ironic, if equally sarcastic comment on the nature of modern psychiatric help, and the relationship, as Landreth views it, between patient and practitioner.

Landreth introduces the main characters of the piece, Dan (voiced by Canadian acting legend Gordon Pinsent) and his wife, Mary (voiced by Alberta Watson) in the session, and the stark contrast in their appearances suggests a relationship of rank inequality. He is ashen, paper-thin (literally), with a forehead composed of ripped shards (as if a giant fork had grazed it), his skin a ghostly pallor, and his body is limp, frail and useless. He slides down chairs, drapes across tables, and lies on floors, seemingly bereft of spine or skeletal structure. Dan’s wife, by comparison, is rotund, bloated, and pink – a blimp, with tiny feet protruding out of her stretched tracksuit. The pulling qualities across her remarkably rendered human face suggest a character at the bursting point, full of grief, loss, and self-loathing.

Once again, Landreth conveys character and inner life through striking visual tools, mixing surreal imagery with human characteristics. Later in the film, Dan is shown in a close-up, and the texture of the skin is remarkable: lizard-like and dried, it’s a network of vampirized veins and canals. Even in the smallest details, huge landscapes of emotional life are revealed. On a technical level, it’s a real showcase of the immense talents of Landreth and the people at Autodesk Canada and Seneca College’s School of Communication Arts who participated in the short’s creation.

Just as involving as simple details is the way that Landreth skilfully weaves visuals and story together. The 11-minute short tells a complete, involving story in a very compact, if deeply engaging manner. The premise is so simple, but the means of telling it are very imaginative. Dan’s wife directs a hail of constant criticism and verbal abuse at him, before deflating – perhaps a symbol of her walking out – Landreth indicates the passage of time by having Dan’s face and body undergo a transformation, gradually filling out, gashes closing and colour returning. A beautiful spine is shown protruding out of his back, even as his forehead occasionally opens to beam pure, healing white light out to all he meets, including Angela, a young fellow patient at the counselling session.

Progress is also indicated in an art class, as Landreth interestingly portrays the regenerative power of creativity. Dan is told to “examine (your) left arm,” and here Landreth gets playfully cheeky. He has his main character promptly pull his arm out of its socket, whence it sprouts leaves and buds, like a tree branch. Dan’s spine, miraculously re-discovered upon the exit of his abusive, self-pitying wife, proudly stands outside of his back, gleaming in sparkling green and purple chunks, as his hair takes on shades of the same, almost matching the deep fuschia of his art instructor’s. The screen suddenly fills with violets and emerald shades, and we are left to ponder Landreth’s view about the nature of creativity, particularly when Mary makes her re-entrance into Dan’s life. Dan’s beautiful spine crumbles like thin plastic, and his human colour drains out of him entirely.

We learn the history of Mary, as she tells, in voiceover, of her infertility and weight issues. Landreth animates these sessions with Mary going from thin and pretty to bloated and deformed with incredible detail. Dan’s once-again-frail figure is shown being coddled by the obese woman, her replacement for the baby she never had, and the final scene shows the two flying into the air, Dan’s thin frame clinging to her like a bug on a balloon, as they soar to the strains of Joe Cocker’s rough, plaintive version of the Leonard Cohen classic “Bird On A Wire.” Angela, the young woman Dan has befriended, is shown with her own beautiful spine, reading the e-mail given the voiceover, her healed face framed by streaks of green and purple hair. It’s a devastating ending to an imaginative, charming, and deeply challenging film.

More upbeat, but no less thoughtful, is Cordell Barker’s 9-minute gem Runaway. Barker is best known to audiences for his beloved, Oscar-nominated 1988 short The Cat Came Back (featuring the catchy title track of the same name). He freely mixes surreal, whimsical elements into the two-dimensional world of everyday occurrences. In Runaway, his third film, he uses a train journey as a metaphor for class distinctions and inequity.

The piece begins simply, with the contrasting images of a racing train, and its chaotic variety of riders, and the silhouette of a cow, set against a plain backdrop that one might suppose could be the Prairies. But Barker’s work embraces wider themes than simple geographic (or nationalistic) matters. Soon the viewer is introduced to the cast of characters populating Runaway’s world: the train’s sycophantic engineer, who looks like a 18th century British naval officer (voiced by Richard Condie) and his assistant, a short, stout, little man who only murmurs but seems to have a distinct Quebecois accent, but comes to be the hero of the piece.
Runaway is set to an upbeat, jazz-inflected score by Benoît Charest, who is best-known for composing the catchy music for the Oscar-nominated animated film The Triplets of Belleville. The music gives the film’s simple premise a fun, flighty feel, under-playing its serious theme. The story is simple: as a speeding train zooms to an unknown destination, its egocentric engineer disappears with one of the female passengers, and the train runs low on fuel. The men who dominate the first-class carriage, suited out with top hats, tails and monocles, and who are portrayed sipping martinis and languidly playing billiards, go to the more raucous lower-class carriage behind them, which is filled with musicians and artists.

Barker draws these characters as being colourful antidotes to the more sober shades in the first-class carriage; loud blues, red, and yellows dominate the screen. One dapper gent grabs a bright yellow hat off a reveller to stuff into the fire, but more fuel is demanded. When the lower class passengers balk, the grey-suited man offers them money, which results in a mass handing-over and subsequent stripping. The way Barker animates this conga-line of clothing, with items being passed right to left, from back to front of train, and the carriage’s subsequent stripping to a skeletal form full of fleshy nude figures, is fascinating and funny, even as it’s disturbing for its subtext. The piece becomes even more disturbing when, as the train climbs a steep hill, the dapper gent who’d procured the hat in the first place hands over a huge bag of money to the naked figures as he pulls the pin between the two carriages, leaving the lower classes who’d given their all (literally) to crash and burn.

Barker continues with the visual symbolism, portraying the train as stalling at the top of a hill despite the recent lower-class fuelling. The engineer re-appears, fresh from a canoodling and blissfully unaware of recent events. He tips the train forwards again, but inadvertently becomes fuel himself in the process. The control room of the train is full of sticks, gears, and earhorns; it’s a kind of submarine-meets-steampunk-via-animation ethos. Yes, in Barker’s world, machines are given a kind of anthropomorphizing that’s not immediately discernible.

There’s a fiercely determined forward propulsion to the movements of this “runaway,” one we sense will come to no good ending. Indeed, any kind of goodness seems lacking, with only one sole moment of kindness glimmering through: a kind of silent understanding passes between the female passenger (shown at the beginning) and the engineer’s assistant –that is, before an inevitably fiery conclusion. However, the cow, seen (and heard) at the short’s start, reappears, walking blissfully unaware down the middle of the train tracks. With a myriad of colours in Barker’s arsenal, and animals being every bit as human as the humans themselves, Runaway is equal parts smart and playful and while its zany visual endears, its socially conscious theme is still effectively, memorably conveyed. Barker’s loopy, sweet animation is the sugar coating on a much larger commentary on the energy crisis and the ways in which exploitation feeds it –literally.

Both The Spine and Runaway stand as incredible testaments to the power of the animated short as a vehicle for expressing important ideas creatively. The visual inventiveness of each stays long in the memory and the thematic importance, and emotional intensity of both works resonates with the viewer far past their relatively quick running times. The films are wonderful examples of Canadian animation at its finest, and are great examples of the artistry at work within the National Film Board. It would appear that some of the brightest gems to shine this year at the Toronto International Film Festival come in the smallest packages.

The Spine was shown as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Shorts Cuts Canada program on September 11th and 12th. From there it travels to the Atlantic Film Festival (September 17-26), the Calgary International Film Festival (September 25 - October 4), the Vancouver International Film Festival (October 1-16). and the Ottawa International Animation Festival (October 14-18).

Runaway will be shown as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Short Cuts Canada 3 Program, running September 13th-14th, and September 18th.