LIFF

The Andreas Hykade one (Love & Theft) was the only really decent one at the animation competition today, if you ask me (and Old Fangs – from the same studio as The Secret of Kells which is also screening in the festival – was tolerable for the beauty of it's sets/backgrounds/décors but largely only as an animated film rather than animation film, if you can work out what I mean by that). And Ci sono gli spiriti (There Are Spirits) was certainly notable for giving us something I really hadn't seen before with that animation of what looked like fibres of thread of some kind but suffered by finding itself in nearly a whole programme of moody existential experience-studies accompanied by electronic droning, which along with the template "OMG it's a cycle aren't you so SHOCKED and TRANSCENDED by the revelation" and "bad stuff happens and then even more bad stuff happens but we can laugh at it" narratives I didn't think were exactly pandemic in indie animated shorts until today but are certainly stereotypical and need to really be excelled in to compensate for this; Ci sono gli spiriti again felt the most successful to me of today's as a film in this category, which is something quite apart from being an impressive amount or drawings or paintings. Still, the few animated films in the Cherry Kino selections, some of which are recent enough to qualify, have knocked the actual animation selections into next Saint Swithun's day so far.

I hold out hope that the second, 35 mm part will be more exciting (as the first World Animation Award I attended, back when it was at the Carriageworks, not only included one of my all-time greatest cinema experiences in the form a screening of Joe Tucker's For the Love of God but many others that were exciting, moving, interesting, fun in their own, if not exceptional at least varied ways; the following year at the Hyde Park Picture House disappointed me in both selection and presentation but after finding I missed Chick and La Maison en petits cubes by skipping it last year I committed myself not to risk that again); or would if the descriptions and stills didn't suggest more along the same lines but, you know, clearer. And anyway it remains one of three things all on that evening which I'd have much difficulty choosing between now that I've missed the first screening of Mundane History and may have to miss them all as well should I still not have this flyer sorted by then.

Current music: Tucker Zimmerman – "Black Oak Tree"