T H E! N E S T
R E V I E W S
A review of The World Animation Programme at Edinburgh 2001
by Kirsty Walker
EIFF 2001 World Animation
Twelve animations from seven countries, all UK premieres and one world premiere, all unique with each employing different methods to bring you quirky and offbeat stories. How could you resist? Forget the films with their boring old human actors. This is where you'll find the true creativity and anything can happen. The USA has covered the humour and tastelessness fronts. The Moving Pyramid by Wolf-Rudiger Bloss is an entertaining new theory on Egypt's pyramids. According to Bloss, pyramids were not built to be stationary, but powered by the old carrot and donkey method, except the donkey is replaced by a flotilla of dozy slaves. With a passing nod to pyramid selling, Pharaohs are toppled and their carriages left to stand in the sand.
In Bike Ride, Tom Schroeder takes a line for a walk, as James Petersen tells the tragic tale of a 50 mile cycle trip to see his girlfriend. After intermittent images of hearts and hugs, he arrives only to be unceremoniously dumped and have to ride home again. Getting"on yer bike" has rarely been more tragi-comic and the tale is helped by drummer Dave King's jazzy backing track. Petersen's dead-pan narration also contrasts well with the animation which tells an entirely different story. While we hear, "I think I took it pretty well", we see the jilted lover's heart being battered into pulp to the sound of raucous percussion.
Rejected, by Don Hertzfeldt, has more than a little South Park about it, although hopefully even the South Park team wouldn't come up with a sketch where a character is drowned by blood from his anus. Other bits are more genuinely funny, however, and the cartoon cast takes on a life of its own as they too feel rejected.
Germany's Jochen Kuhn offers one of the most thought provoking pieces in Recently 2, where a new machine in a doctor's surgery can see far beyond the body's internal organs.
The Irish contribution offers computer animation as well as some of the most traditional illustrative work. The latter is a haunting interpretation of Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market", a kind of Victorian version of events in the Garden of Eden. The result, created by Suzanne Arnold is infinitely superior to Owen Fitzpatrick's computer-rendered The Nest, a rather boring, unimaginative tale of a baby abandoned on a beach.
Two of the best pieces are stop frame puppet animation. In Caravan, Ferenc Fisher of Hungary spins a delightful tale of a traffic jam in the desert - if only all gridlock situations could result in social interactions and life long friends. In Pizza Passionata, Kari Juusonen of Finland, tells an entertaining, but poignant love story. Toivo is a chronically shy, lonely man, a grey man in a grey world, but in his dreams he is an arctic explorer, a macho man can make a bear faint by roaring at him. As he tries to woo his next door neighbour, the fantasy character is unmasked, but in the end the two find mutual ground in a game of ping-pong.
Kirsty Walker
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anima Mundi 2001 - The 9th Anima Mundi 2001 Animation Film Festival of Brazil
A review of The Nest by Eduardo Valente (translated from Portuguese by Eduardo Cerveira) from Contracampo: revista de cinema #30
The Nest: a life in ten minutes
In the midst of the Anima Mundi marathon, it's easy to watch more than 100 short films in less than 10 days. The difficult part is for one of these shorts to keep hammering inside the head of the one who watches it, days after the session. Not for a lack of interest on the production in general, but mainly for the fact that due to the extreme amount of films in exhibition, it generally makes these marathons tiring runabouts that seem to hinder the chances that one separate film has such effect. Well, all this only magnifies the value that we give to a film such as The Nest. It is a 10-minute Irish animation, a simple computer animation, directed by Owen Fitzpatrick.
Its greatest quality perhaps is, by the way, its technique. But not because of an exhibition of manual or technological dexterity, which devastates so many other cartoons. Mainly for its capacity to surprise the spectator. In Animation there is an unspoken rule, according to which the appearance of a film allows the spectator to read all the meaning that it possesses. Even in the most interesting works. What do I mean by this? That all films that try to discuss more serious subjects, more reflective, possess dark tones, strange climates and atmospheres, strange traces, sauterne clay figures. I mean, they seem to cry out: this film is serious! On the other side, the funnier films have the light trace, many times pretty, many times comic, and announce their funniness beforehand. There are still the ironic examples, the excellent films of Don Hertzfeldt, or thinking about TV, those of The Simpsons and South Park. Here the technique, anarchical and lazy, lets us predict the searched effect.
The Nest goes directly against this. Not only it brings a beautiful but almost "naive" technique, that plunges the spectator into the "comedy" mood, and specifically the lighter and inoffensive comedy. Even worse: it has a baby as the main character. Babies are the most obvious representation of innocence, pureness, cuteness. The film starts with this: a baby on the beach, in front of the sea. It emits the typical sounds of babies, magnifying the "ooohhhs" and "aaahhhs" of the audience. How cute! A radio is turned on at his side, even though it's not possible to understand very well, it describes a common news bulletin. Some music is played. The spectator starts to wait for the next step: what cute act will this baby make? In which comic intrigue will it become involved?
Some fadeouts always take us back to the same scene: the motionless baby. He looks around, astonished: the sea, the seagulls, the wind, the sand. How cute. Five minutes passes by, and nothing else happens. The filmmaker "films" the baby in a fixed medium-shot, shows the sea once in a while, the sun, comes back in an eventual close-up, but always returns to the more general shot, and the baby, there, motionless.
The spectator starts to get unsettled. Where did this baby come from? Making an effort we remember that the first sound of the film, still with the black screen, was that of a car pulling out... Will it be that the parents had left the child on the beach? Ah, but then they will soon come back...
The necessity of establishing a narrative starts to get annoying. We need a past that justifies this child here, motionless. But, mainly, we need a future, an action. Impossible not to think of "Waiting for Godot". We wait the redemptious action, the one that will bring meaning to everything. And it does not come. Only the baby, the sea (and its seductive sound starts to be irritating), the seagulls. The sun. He continues emitting his pre-speaking sounds. He naps, falls to sleep. Fadeout. He wakes up. In the same place, the baby, the beach, nothing happens. More fadeouts, and nothing.
Dusk. And the baby there. And the images continue to be beautiful, continue to be graceful, but the audience is not deceived anymore: the film has something strange to it. Divided between being bothered by the impatience of the non-action, or laughing at this. But nothing yet indicates anything other than a comedy, even if by irony. Fadeout.
Dawn. The same general shot. There is the baby in the same place, but now the seagulls overtake the whole cradle, pecking the boy already dead, eating what remains of him. Just like that, suddenly. " The end ", also suddenly. That's all. Some sparse laughs, applauses, but mostly a feeling of being very much uncomfortable.
And I, days later, can't take this baby out of my head, despite of whatever I might I see in the festival. It can be a metaphor of the existence of the human being, in its passage through Earth. It can be many things, by the way, for each spectator. But, above all, the more films I see in the Festival, I do not stop thinking of the intelligence of a director in dealing with the expectations of a crowd, in making cinema above all a game between the screen and spectator, where the filmmaker holds the wires that move the puppets within his hands, and can do whatever he wants with it. And, when he knows what to do, can make the spectator his own toy, even more so than the film itself. The result is an admirable film, not less than this. It justifies and is worth a whole festival.
Eduardo Valente
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For a full list of credits please click here
For details on the pre-production history of The Nest please click on the following link:
'The Nest' Copyright 2001 Owen Fitzpatrick/Rocket Animation/Funding Partners - All Rights Reserved
Contact us at: