canonical momentum

ok, so I'm back in the UK and we're getting close to being caught up.

the big highlight of Friday would turn out to be Tangles, but first we watched the remainder of the graduation films (GF1) - a pathé showing without the directors again. another strong collection, with the exception of the last film which got half the audience walking out - you get one guess why.

first up we had Agathe Must Go by Dylan Hall and Maya Matar, and I fear that here I've committed a Blogging Error, accidentally describing this one in place of another film in Midnight Shorts. so, correction: this is one one with the old woman menaces by the goblin-like creature, which she attempts to fight off, while her daughter doesn't believe her. gonna have to go back and figure out what that other film was...

Ball Face by Laurence Thérien was absolutely fantastic. a coach makes a group of children play a game of bouncing a ball off the wall, benching them whenever they miss the catch. one girl repeatedly 'catches' it with her face, each time causing the clay to splash out into extravagant impact shapes. absolutely wonderful rhythm and motion and physical comedy.

A Body Without A Horse by Lara Fuke was also really strong. opening with a bunch of questionable horses, it then moves to describe a human 'body without a horse' in terms of what it isn't, with equine metaphors for the person's anxieties etc., in a fascinating depersonalising way. the animation is quite abstract transformation in pencils but it never drags, humour balancing the angst very elegantly.

I Am Li Yangqiao by five person team (all credited as directors) Yiqian Ma, Qianai Lin, Xihan Yin, Zhiyan Chen, and Ruizhe Pan continued the roll of absolutely top notch films. this depicts a miner trapped in a collapsed shaft and fantasising about the surface, gradually filling in the backstory of how he ended up on the job, his relationships to other miners, the danger of the work etc. an incredibly confident film all round.

after these fantastic entries was a run of pretty solid ones, though this is where the week started to catch up with my and a certain amount of sleepiness was hitting: Mauruuru Roa by Ysoline Despierre showed the cruel psychic impact and lingering effects of French nuclear testing in Polynesia; The Mirage of a Dream by Kalyani B depicted a voiceover by a grandmother about a girl who's dream was stolen by her society only to make an interesting pull back to the editing room part way through due to the death of the narrator; Plankton α by Yini Guo I'm sorry to say I don't remember very well but I think it was quite abstract and nicely textured.

Terhered by Alessandro Cino Zolfanelli was a neat stop motion puppet one; a boy from the moon comes down and falls for a hunter girl, joining her at a festival as she shows how life works on earth, only for the moon to increasingly pull him up to the sky (a little Princess Kaguya with it). Impressive variety of settings, and expressive movement.

False Door by Oktawia Derybowska I don't remember very well unfortunately, but yvette said it had a cool sandy texture, a cowboy trying to escape the underworld pursued by a lynx into a city staying just ahead. I need to watch it again and fix this memory slip >_<

The Sea Spirit by Edwin Ivemark Kihlström was a very fun one; two brothers living in a house full of birds, one sick and bedridden, and the other encounters a strange planktony slime creature on the beach which asks to eat birds to feed it for a long journey. the brother complies, and the other brother wakes up to find him mid sacrifice.

and then it's the one that got everyone to walk out. did you guess AI? yep. someone straight up called out 'this one's AI' as they were leaving which got a lot of other people to leave too. I can only imagine how the screening in Bonlieu with the directors present would have gone.

I didn't walk out, part morbid curiosity and part 'my phone fell under my chair'. so I can tell you about this crap.

so, the film, The Amazing Kitsuverse by Leo Neumann, seems like a fairly typical anti-AI parable; a woman is drawn into a magical paradise by a fox where anything is possible, only to find her individuality extracted as she is turned into an identical bird. rather undercutting the message is the screens at the end insisting that the short used AI tools in an ethical way, and enthusiastically listing all the tools used, mainly a finetuned stable diffusion for the fox to flicker to different styles and also 'chatgpt for grammar checking'.

now like, I'm not a big believer in copyright, but I do kind of think 'I trained a LoRA on top of the model that famously scraped absolutely everything' is a pretty weak defense if you're trying to paint yourself as different from those other AI guys. and it all just feels so completely unnecessary; the ugly AI effects add nothing to the film except a little 'fuck you' to all the artists at Annecy who are facing a very plausible fear that their medium might be trashed in favour of this shit, just as has been happening in software. more than the use of these tools, it's the smug attitude that really gets to me.

and if the Shostakovich one in Short Films 1 felt borderline, insofar as it was using the tool to achieve a specific labour intensive, technical effect which would be very difficult to achieve another way, this one was just gratuitous. a baffling inclusion in the festival; yvette noted they put both AI films at the end of their respective programmes as if in cynical anticipation that people would walk out.

hello to all 2 or 3 people still reading this lol

so, Friday! I ended up in Spacetime Chronicles, another contrechamp gamble. this was an Italian film and I neglected to notice that this screening was one with French subtitles, so it made it a little hard to follow, but the story concerns a man contemplating a life filled with unlikely mishaps as he tried to go to Japan to be with a girl, with recurring motifs being plane crashes and a book called Spacetime Chronicles with a missing last page. there were a few rather dubious discussions of relativity in there too. the best aspect of the film was surely its visual style, with everything being made out of colourful folded paper and animated in stop motion. i was curious enough to see the screening through despite the language barrier. worth taking a look if you like this kind of existential story.

after some more VR - I'll get to it! - the afternoon began with deciding to take a chance on Studio 4°C's new film Chimney Town: Frozen in Time, the sequel to Poupelle of Chimney Town. I've not seen the original, though the sequel is not particularly hard to follow and largely takes place in another world anyway.

the film concerns young chimneysweep Lubicchi, who after the events of the first film is grieving his friend Poupelle the 'garbage man' constructed of odds and ends. but this is just an emotional frame story; Lubicchi falls into a totally different psychopomp dimension that revolves around clocks, notably one giant clock that has stopped because its creator went mad. meanwhile we see the story of the romance between the arrogant keeper Keeper Gus and a woman Nagi who (spoilers) turns out to be a tree in human form. during a fire, Nagi disappeared and was presumed dead, and Gus spent the next forty years sitting in his tower grieving; the tower, in sympathy, stopped the big clock. to resolve this, Lubicchi must pilot a glider down a hole in order to bring Nagi back.

I can't compare this to the previous Chimney Town, but I am not really enjoying 4°C's recent turn towards hetero love stories as their main thing. I found this one a bit less grating than Chao, though the animation - while pretty serviceable 3DCG - is not as impressive either. ultimately it's a kids' movie; a pretty decent kids' movie with some cool designs. not quite sure how 'actually she wasn't dead, just hiding in a hole for daft reasons' really answers the question of grief though. anyhow...

I'm sure everyone's enjoying these posts where I tell you briefly about a bunch of films you haven't seen :p

Thursday I was looking forward to this unofficial 'annecy rejects' screening at Cinema les Nemours but it turned out word had spread fast and people were queuing for this past capacity like 3-4 hours in advance. a shame because it sounded really cool. there was an LGBT meetup, so for the second time in a couple of days I met really cool british trans girl at the french animation festival. (shoutout to evie if you read this :P )

Thursday actually started with TV Films 4, because I was too late for whatever else it was I was queuing for (maybe iron boy?). this had quite a scifi martial arts focus, though it opened with a short French historical thing about a secret Black daughter of Louis XIV who lived out her life in a convent. after that, though it was a lot of battles. we had an episode of the new Filoni Star Wars series about Darth Maul, who seems to be some kind of crime lord; lots of lightsabering took place, and at the end, would you believe it, Darth Vader showed up. a long time ago I was quite into Filoni's star wars animations but I don't think this one is gonna bring me back, but it was a fun little diversion.

more interesting was the Chinese animation that followed. we had the first episode of a pretty playful webtoon adaptation titled The Chosen One about an art student who has to stay in a town haunted by all sorts of spooky Daoist stuff, which was a fun kind of silly; and also an episode of the Bilibili 3DCG series Ling Cage which was honestly great fun, silly final fantasy/rwby-esque martial arts battles with monsters where, like a fighting game, every character has some kind of chuuni gimmick and flashy moves, and then in the second half some high melodrama about who betrayed who. I think I might get into this series, it seems like a really fun kind of stupid.

Wuthering Hearts, a brief Channel 4 cartoon about a goth girl in Yorkshire, was also really cute. the final short Il Barrachino, an Italian one about some furries trying to run a comedy club, could have done with a lighter touch but it was fine.

ok, fast forward; after the LGBT meetup, I went down to Short Films 4 in Bonlieu, which means more chances to briefly look at some directors!

we opened with Virdem Fandago dir. Marcy Page, a Portugese-Canadian piece in which Mary, as depicted on Portugese tiles, sings a song about feminism. pretty catchy, nicely painted, and hard to object on the surface, but of course it turns into an extended montage celebrating important historical women including such figures as Margaret Thatcher which makes me really feel a bit ??? about the whole thing. (i did not manage to catch whether any trans women feature in their memory of history's important women.) tfw liberalism ig

Penguin by Kaspar Jancis had a fun concept; a man goes to Antarctica and kills and stuffs an emperor penguin; we follow from the point of view of his wife as he returns gradually transforms into a penguin himself; she gradually comes to terms with this and eventually returns him to the original penguin's partner in Antarctica.

Lake Messejana was an environmental one with very nice depictions of cranes and their lake as humans move in; Daughters of the Late Colonel dir. Elizabeth Hobbs really stood out for its scribbly, Quentin Blake-esque drawing style.

The Quinta's Ghost by James A. Castillo was a rather cool one, depicting a tormented painter narrated from the point of view of his house. from that it was definitely possible to guess that it was about Goya and the Black Paintings, but the painterly 3DCG style and the way his feelings came across was really effective all the same.

How To Walk dir. Zak Margolis was a fascinating technical one. it opened with an ironic Reagan quote about the lack of limits to growth which got some laughs, and then shows a growing humanoid pile of detritus and garbage walking from the forest, through a city, and eventually into an ocean. The swarming detritus is constantly moving around and through the figure, I assume using some kind of physics simulation with rigid body colliders, would love to know more.

Through the Woods dir. Agnès Patron depicts a brother and sister going into the woods and becoming separated as the sister has a kind of surreal spiritual experience with the moon; by the time they reunite she is a lot older. very cool, distant mood; i think it suffered a little from being placed at the end of the block, and I'd like to see it again with more energy to pay attention...

a pretty strong block, all told!

following SF3 I joined Yvette for more VR, I'll talk about that later.

After that we headed in to Grad Films 4, where, would you believe it, we found another British film about being trans.

first though we had a few others, starting with bugs. Tar by Fariba Farzanfar and Kaveh Sistani from Iran accomplished the impressive feat of doing stop motion with hair, also featuring the instrument of the same name as a girl's playing transforms a centipede into a butterfly. Insecticide by Paula Gallego González, in which a bug person tries to fuck his reflection in a TV-like surface. cool stop motion styles here and I love it when there are bugs.

next, The Black Egg by Ousmane Cissé! a tiny son defies his gigantic father by trying to open a cursed alchemical egg which doomed humanity to live underground. in the course of this, he grows up and his father shrivels, and at last comes out to reconcile with his father... I really enjoyed the imagery and visual style of this one, quite specifically an African fantasy story and you know I love a story in which humanity is cursed by an egg.

then, the trans one! Eyeliner by Aisha Boudjillouli is a stop motion one in which a trans schoolgirl steals eyeliner with her friend, only to face ostracisation when she tries to hang out with the other girls, and her friend deserts her for the sake of staying with the popular girls. it's a sweet short; we spoke to Aisha after and he actually recognised Yvette from a totally different and very animation unrelated context, which was petty funny.

From Narva with Love by Paulina Belik told of the director's memories of being a 'street child', which was a lot of taking drug residues and messing with people. the narration is kind of apologetic for harming people, but to be honest the kids come across as just, you know, kids.

Aïcha Kandicha by Fayrouz Harmatallah Sbaï tells a possible origin story for a Moroccan witch figure invoked in a mirror similar to Bloody Mary, casting her as a woman taking bloody revenge on Portugese slaver colonists. pretty neat.

Nursing Room by Tianjing Yuan and Sijia Wang gave a pretty brutal image of mothers cutting off various bodyparts with scissors and feeding them to their babies in floating spheres, a pretty brutally on the nose metaphor brought home by the unsettling painterly style and whispery soundtrack.

So He Grabbed the Knife by Sam Kuwa was fantastic, getting us in the head of a boy snapping under various pressures from controlling parents and the world around him with really sharp editing that builds elements that at first seem innocuous into the inevitably violent conclusion. fantastic bit of filmmaking, def looking forward to being able to show that one.

Gently by Jamaica Kindlová was similarly excellent, depicting from hand drawn first person perspective a child's attempts to sneak out and pick up a toy without being seen by a violent, abusive parent. really intense and effective and a very challenging technical style too.

finally, Free Food Race by Swan Brocher had an incredible energetic illustration and movement style as a hungry student contends with a pigeon to get food before the stall outside her house closes. really really cool work.

all in all, a fantastic block. so we grabbed some food and headed straight on to queue for Grad Films 3 at Pathé. this did mean not seeing Jim Queen, the recent French gay comedy film, or Zsazah Zaturnnah, the Filipino film about a gay man who transforms into a female superhero; it's possible that either of these was very good but I don't think either of us was really in the mood for it that night.

Grad Films 3 then! once more we opened with bugs, in this case Foreign Bodies by Lysander Wong, a short and creepy piece in which a girl fights to stop insects crawling out of holes in her body.

Bonefuzz by Krisztina Darók was a very naturalistic one about a deaf boy attending a gig with his friends, losing his hearing aid in the process; very effective sound design. Dying Embers by Léa Pulini continues the character focus with a tough grandmother menaced by a goblin-like creature, with her daughter unconvinced it's real; this one had a really good punchline.

Immature by Eddy Wu covered the trans angle for this block, through not from the UK this time (instead Netherlands/Taiwan); a trans guy discussing body feelings over really cool abstracted shapes of body parts, calling to mind either mr potato head or the behelit. this wasn't a 'directors present' screening which is a shame bc I'd like to meet the director lol.

A Bloody Situation by Nerian Keywan depicts a pretty everyday situation in Palestine in a somewhat surreal way; a girl working at a hairdresser is dealing with her first period, personified as a customer called Mrs Moodswings. given the context the war inevitably lurks in the background but it's never directly addressed. appreciated seeing a Palestinian film in the festival (though the director made it at RCA).

Jincheng Driving School by Bing Hao Jiao took the naturalistic acting focus of this segment and took it to the limit, portraying a group of kids having a driving lesson and the various mishaps they encounter (like a pig falling on the road). a very meticulously character focused piece and quite effective for it.

the Gobelins film The Rossini Garden appeared in this block, telling the story of an artist who's determined to make his daughter stay and continue his legacy, whether or not she wants to. it's actually kind of odd to me that we don't see either more Gobelins films at Annecy or none, given that they are invariably extremely good and Gobelins has a close connection with the festival through the intro videos already. in any case, this was cool to see on the big screen.

The 12 Inch Pianist by Lucas Ansel was excellent, taking the joke everybody knows and spinning it into a fun little bit of silly emotional drama without letting go of the humour. a really well structured film and gay to boot.

the last couple of films were a bit awkward. one, Queens of the Pampa by Millaray Isella Arriagada tells the story of a real child murderer from the point of view of one of the victim's parents. it wasn't quite clear what to take beyond well, that was an awful thing that happened. the final film, Taming Phenomena by Shunyuan Yao, was a lot more abstract, playing with clips of chickens and elephants walking and tramsforming with various media; it ended up working quite well, sort of playing very directly with the medium and substance of animation.

and that was the end of Thursday, the day that was pretty much all short films. it was really cool seeing Yvette get so into the grad films, v much looking forward to showing her more faves when we get home.

so i sort of remembered going to grad films at this point but it doesn't seem like it, it would have been grad films 3 and we didn't see that til later...

in fact I think this is when we (that is, me and Yvette) went to the Disturbing Weirdness block, followed by Midnight Shorts 1, which proved to be a really good night of horror shorts.

Disturbing Weirdness obviously stood out to me on the programme, and indeed it did a pretty good job of living up to it - not necessarily in terms of being weirder than other stuff in the festival but just in terms of being a very strong collection of shorts with a fair whack of cannibalism and body horror imagery. also a lot of these are old enough to link online!

Stanley, our opening short, was a stop motion in the 'situation leading up to a murder' subgenre, in this case depicting a meat loving woman married to a man who is growing an enormous cabbage. I appreciate how scrunchy and gender ambiguous the puppets were here.

things got really great with Wander to Wonder, directed Nina Gantz, which imagines the borrower-sized characters in a disconcerting british stop motion kids show surviving the showrunner's death and trying to survive, and not lose their minds, trapped in the studio. really great concept and fantastic execution, completely nailing every aspect of the tone here.

On the Other Side of the Woods dir. Anu-Laura Tuttelberg had a cool surreal stop motion take on Red Riding Hood.

Hilary by Anthony Hodgson is a hard one to describe; a dad tells his son a convoluted story about a woman full of dry acidic humour, illustrated by stop motion imagery. it ends up working really well, in large part on the strength of the voice acting.

Max by Emilien Pichon gave a really fun take on the 'cursed building' theme, following a boy called Max who moves into a building only to find the landlady is doing some occult shit. Max's flat deadpan affect plays very well against the other characters here, and makes for a very funny resolution. sadly this film doesn't seem to be online.

wrapping up the block came Bestia, which within a few seconds of seeing it activated my memory of 'oh shit it's the dog one'. the film depicts a woman employed to torture people for Chile's National Intelligence Directorate using her dog, which we only gradually realise. at one point she fucks the dog. the puppet's unmoving porcelain face works really well here; her emotions are communicated instead through movements and environment or just left for us to infer. it's a really cool and memorably disturbing film and I'm really glad to share it with yvette x3

Midnight Shorts 1 kept the roll going, and Yvette and I ended up sat right behind the directors as well.

The Flesh Dress dir Joachim Hérissé depicts a proud dressmaker feeling left behind by social change and the advance of age, who gets an awful idea when his wife dies and her flesh gets torn off with her dress; haunted by his wife seemingly returning, he increasingly loses his shit. really striking and original.

Hunger dir Imanol Ortiz López depicts a couple trying to convince themselves to kill their vampire baby, with some fantastic character performances. delightfully, the director had a doll of the vampire baby with him.

Wolpie of the Woods dir Kat Messing was absolutely wonderful, depicting a bunch of extremely creature creatures in a forest setting; a bunch of nasty little hedgehog creatures manipulate wolpie to fetch them berries, putting the poor beast in increasingly desperate situations until it starts to realise what was going on. the team were handing out stickers and even brought the Wolpie puppet. Yvette was delighted by this film, I got a chance to photograph her with it.

And then, crazily, we hit the adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's comic A Couple of Cluckin' Chickens Were Still Kickin' In The Schoolyard. Which I believe he wrote at age 16. I knew the manga (it's in the 16-21 collection), and was vaguely aware it had been adapted, but didn't expect it to show up in this block.

given it's a Fujimoto thing, they go pretty all out with his adaptation, adding all sorts of fun little details to the way the aliens move, flashy as hell action scenes, etc. It does arguably lose something of the charming roughness of the original comic, but it was a really fun film.

after it ended, Yvette and I had a conversation along the lines of...

Y: holy shit. me: yeah have you read the… (…) me: do you reckon tatsuki fujimoto is like, here? Y: surely not, he'd be swarmed with people right me: does anyone actually know what he looks like though? Y: hey, maybe he's a femboy me: that would be so good announcer: nous accueillons… we welcome… seishiro nagaya! seishiro nagaya stands up from the seat right in front of me

so yeah that was slightly mortifying, maybe nagaya is gonna go home and say 'hey tatsuki, you'll never guess what these english trans chicks were saying about you'.

Praying Mantis dir. Joe Hsieh is one I had seen before in Edinburgh's Manipulate festival, and just as good the second time. a mantis woman, manipulated by an creepy nurse, is killing people to feed to her bug son. gradually the backstory is revealed; there's a lot of absolutely fantastic imagery of bug chomping, and just an incredible mood.

and we ended with a bunch of increasingly abstract cannibalism in Dinner dir. Young-Seok Choi. I don't remember this one super well, it was pretty late by that point, I think it was a series of meal scenes with people eating different bits of each other.

so this isn't really a film festival review post, that will continue shortly, but it's kind of provoked by coming here.

one of the things that factor into 'all this ??? plural shit' is that factors of memory and personality seem to be tied to specific places, and specific people. we've experienced this most uncomfortably when we go to visit our parents; without language with which to process it, the sense of old memories and habits of being resurfacing felt kind of like being haunted.

here in annecy, too, there is a sense of reviving a past self, but it feels good, not suffocating. I bought a sketchbook and started drawing again while I was here, after many many months of not touching a pencil. there was a period where drawing and animation was like the main thing 'I' thought about day to day. and then that faded away, and along with it faded ways of being, revived once in a while for a small trans library film night. other contexts like the creative coding/demoscene stuff, the philosophy of mind/neuroscience/psychedelic stuff, games... came in; other friend groups built new contexts and new clusters of thought-habit.

but thanks to the work that... can i say my headmates? it still feels weird to say that 'out loud', even on the blog that is read largely by various kinds of strange trans people, a significant proportion of whom are plural. but like ok clearly (clearly from in here at least) "I'm" something different than what "I've" been even a week ago. I'm using 'I' pronouns, for one. whoever I am, I don't feel like I can speak for the collective right now. but yeah, thanks to them... I have this frame to interpret this experience. and I can also express that I would like to come back and be around some more, I'd like it if we keep drawing pictures and writing in the ways I do when I get back from annecy.

obviously everyone else wants to do all sorts of shit and I don't wanna get in the way of making our game and going to hacker camps and kink parties and so forth, but like, we did get really into drawing, and even if I (the one that draws and obsesses with animation) couldn't really hold on there and had to pull back for a bit, I don't want to disappear entirely. so if we could figure out what rituals it takes to bring 'me' online, that'd be really cool.

so, Edge of Time!

this was not at all clear from the description, but it turned out to be a Chinese-Japanese anthology film loosely by four directors, one of them Shinichiro Watanabe, organised by themes of time travel, tragic romance in times of war, and visual motifs such as red and white roses or a robot design. beyond these broad features, the films did not have a lot in common, despite gestures towards a frame story about two souls trying to find each other across fragments related in voiceover between films.

it would probably have helped to know this was an anthology film going in, though it became pretty clear when the first film in Mandarin gave way to the second film in Japanese with a pretty distinct art style. that said, I'm not 100% which director/studios handled which segment, though apparently Watanabe's is the last segment.

I think I got more out of this one than Yvette; despite the incoherence of the frame story and the individual segments generally being fairly tropey, I was able to enjoy the varied visual styles. the second film, which concerns the emotional connection between two women through a pair of flowers who turn out, inevitably, to be separated both in time and the sides of the war they're fighting, had some particularly cool costumes and creature designs.

the third film was a kind of noir cyberpunk story about a film director, a love triangle, and various assassination attempts within a fairly absurd war between cyborgs and unmodified humans; the premise, especially with its cackling villain leading the cyborgs, was a bit too hard to take as seriously as it seemed to want to take itself. so it ended up feeling a little overwrought.

the fourth film (by Watanabe), A Girl Meets a Boy and a Robot, has some lovely post apocalyptic settings, with autonomous robots continuing to fight after the humans are wiped out; it does, however, build to a completely baffling twist ending that did not really land at all for me.

and the first film... an anime news network reviewer, who seems to be one of the only people to have written about this anthology online, is scathing towards this one as 'indulgent fluff', but i like a little indulgence. it's a largely wordless story in which a young girl plays with a mermaid-like diving suited figure among giant discarded toys. with a very old-school 3DCG style it was honestly quite fascinating to watch. this story is used to frame the others in the anthology; the young girl is blown up by a missile after the girls somehow awaken underwater war machinery in a huge pit, and the mermaid-like girl goes to try to find her again, seemingly reincarnating across worlds à la Tezuka's Phoenix (or Cloud Atlas if you prefer lol). it doesn't really work, but it feels like the seeds of something that could.

ultimately i kind of liked this film because it was so weird and janky, and of course it reminded me of the anime anthology films that started Animation Night. if I'm reinhabiting a personality that has been dormant for a while in returning to Annecy, perhaps it's no surprise I feel this way. in any case, I do absolutely feel like Edge of Time would be fun to bring out of the festival for a group watch; I'll have to see if it already has a wider release if I'm ever able to start doing film nights again.

as i write this, the festival is over! there's still a couple of open air screenings but they're in French and it's too damn hot outside. what an incredible festival... and the blogging is very much not over.

this is where my memories get a little jumbled, but i believe my wednesday began with Keeper of the Camphor Tree, an anime film about a boy who is bailed out of prison by his rich aunt who assigns him the task of keeping a mystical camphor tree without deigning to explain very much about it. it's a film in the 'kid learns to take on adult responsibility' subgenre of anime, but much of the plot is a mystery concerned with Reito's efforts to figure out what the camphor tree is doing, along with the obligatory love interest girl. curiously it is a film that seems to very much sympathise with the affairs of the rich; as much as Reito is an outsider, his arc is in significant part about learning to perform class and participate in high society, and a lot of the stakes are like 'will this hotel be closed' or 'who will inherit the company'. rather conservative outlook notwithstanding, it was overall an enjoyable enough film with pretty solid character animation, interesting as a kind of window into someone's feelings about tradition, dementia, and dealing with the future; not one i would say to go out of your way to watch, though.

after this I popped to the shops and randomly ran into Suresh Eriyat of Studio Eeksaurus, who actually remembered me as the person who spontaneously bought his book in BDFugue two years ago; he was here with his wife Nilima this year, and they told me to come to the signing session on Friday. score one more for having a memorable appearance and being willing to just walk up to people ig x3 i would never claim to have a particularly high profile among animators but it is nice to be remembered...

(to briefly get into the Stuff, it feels like I've settled into a pretty stable persona while in annecy, as if 'annecy Bryn' redownloaded, or perhaps reconstituted, upon stepping off the coach here. more on that in another post probably... both bc I'm not sure how much other people wanna read about our attempts to figure out what we are and bc it will branch away from film writing headspace...)

there followed some Annecy Queuing Festival shenanigans; I couldn't get into Lucy Lost (an adaptation of a Michael Morpurgo novel) or Pilgrims (a cool sounding Korean scifi film) but eventually did manage to find my way into Winnipeg, Seeds of Hope, a Spanish-Chilean film about refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War in the late 30s on the ship Winnipeg. I was a bit doubtful going in but I tried to give it a a fair shot.

so, the good: a great deal of attention had clearly been paid to nuts and bolts historical detail - the clothing, mechanics etc. unfortunately, the storytelling and animation did not live up to this. it felt like at every turn, it took the most direct, predictable and unsubtle choice - characterisation, movement, etc., even colour, all felt sadly very lacking in personality. it's a place where I feel like the comparison with a similar anime is instructive: Paris ni saku Étoile, which I'll talk about later, also took a kid's eye view of a slightly gentler than reality historical setting (with, admittedly, a lot more liberties) with a fairly by the numbers plot, but was full of expressive movement, detailed backgrounds, interesting architecture etc., and storytelling that could actually sell an emotion, which made the whole thing feel more alive and less just an educational lesson.

Winnipeg was in the contrechamp category, and it's a reasonable contrechamp inclusion; it's doing something unusual. sadly though the execution wasn't there... still an interesting bit of history.

I left Winnipeg a little early to go to VR, unfortunately still too late to get the chance to see Short Films 3 with Yvette. she tells me that there was one excruciatingly heavy handed 40 minutes long film in there, but also a couple of really good ones. in retrospect I would have been better off queuing for SF3 than seeing Winnipeg and a couple of so-so VR films, but inevitably there will be things I don't get to see at Annecy, I'll have to keep an eye out to see when they get out of festival dungeon...

I'll write a separate post on VR later, since it's a bit jumbled up when I'll see what; I think Weds was the Henry Darger one and the Sikh menopause one?

now to cover lots and lots (and lots) of short films! we're running two three four days late on blogging but so be it, the blogging will crawl along when it can. so, rolling the memory window back to Tuesday...

following Nobody came Official Short Films 2. this one felt kind of like the 'fucking russia, amirite' block with both a stopmotion voiceover film about russian dissidents escaping st petersburg and a stopmotion wordless film about a boy escaping Sokhemi during the Abkhazia conflict. before it could all get a bit too bleak, we hit Cosmonauts by Leo Černic was a strangely somewhat melancholy film about a kind of sex party rocket cruise which was pretty charming as far as 'haha... sex' films go.

also speaking of films that introduce a bunch of funny little guys and put them in a situation, i quite enjoyed Balconada by Iva Tokmakchieva, a wordless film about people hanging out on a balconies of an apartment complex as the wind picks up and one of them plays a flute solo. french as shit lol. when you watch a whole bunch of short films, for me at least the ones that do something fun with music and pacing tend to be the stickiest - something to remember when i come home with the annecy motivation boost.

overall, a pretty solid block! then came grad films 2 and damn, the grad films have been really top notch this year. highlights included Fingerbang by Yeonwoo Kim which told a delightful story about a woman falling into an obsessive sexual relationdship with a carnivorous disembodied finger, which is full of the kind of nasty imagery we canmoms enjoy.

Wyatt Carson's film Mis-Angel hit as well, the first of a few explicitly trans films we'd see during the festival, this one a cool paint-on-glass+cutout one about a trans girl's fantasy of getting to know a cis girl she glimpses briefly at a bus stop, asking what makes her and this other girl different. i got to speak with Wyatt after the screening a bit, and she spoke of it as her babytrans feelings film, that she sees it a little different now, and i do get that but honestly just getting to see something like this on the big screen here. (she wasn't even the only british trans animator I'd meet at annecy this year lol, given the climate in the uk at the moment it is funny and honestly kind of cheering how such a large portion of british student films this year are on trans feelings.)

of note as well were Fisheye by Łukasz Rygał and Cold Bathroom by Eleni Aerts both offered very effective unsettling and surreal imagery involving animals and transformation in everyday settings. one concerns a petrol station attendant who ends up left with a fish to look after (it does not end well), the other a woman fighting to stop a frog from emerging from her body. very strong in both cases...

we were not done with short films after that by any means though. next came Midnight Shorts 2, which I decided to duck into to watch with yvette despite it overlapping with WTF later. largely a pretty solid block looking back, but i think a certain fatigue had set in. the first three films all concerned medical themes: a surreal Korean film about a woman calling detectives for her missing ear, that turned out to be the dream of a coma patient; a dreamlike painterly film about the illness and suicide of writer Horacio Quiroga; a story of a boy going to a creepy apartment to care for a terminally ill parent only for the building to be flooded with horror goop. all of these had strong moments, though collectively they started to feel a little heavy. the next, Carla and her Legs, depicted a woman without legs in a kind of Weimar Berlin(esque?) setting attempting to get a place as a performer. despite how stylish it looked, it ended up feeling a bit overbearing; legs are played as a metaphor for sexualisation in a kind of grating way.

by contrast, I quite enjoyed Éclosion, which portrays a cyborg semi skeletal bird creature attempting to reproduce by growing another such creature from an egg. the scientist bird alternately tortures and cares for its chick, seemingly never quite understanding what it's made, until eventually the light of outside forces its way in and the chick undergoes a phoenix-like transformation and leaves. the balance of cruelty and tenderness was quite compelling and i do love a freaky creature.

at this point a wiser woman would have left to make her reservation for WTF, but I was intrigued by the sightly confrontational content warning for the next short, My Name Is Lilith, and decided to stick around and take my chances. the short was pretty cool, though definitely the kink club scenes at the start were the strongest part.

having seen this I finally left the theatre and sprinted down the street to Bonlieu, and after a little bit of pleading with the volunteers, was allowed in to one of the very last seats for WTF.

WTF is one of the events at Annecy I most look forward to every year; a compilation of weird short films by web animators presented by the Titmouse guys which has the most party-like atmosphere of the festival, the energetic audience eager to clap to the beat, sing along, and shout out every lapin. thanks to my late arrival I somehow ended up at the end of a row right next to the Titmouse guys, which I only realised after they came and sat down after their intro.

here's the directors coming out to introduce their films; of particular note were the team who made the Gobelins film Skin Flick who came out in matching shirts and declared that all six of them would be having a baby together. this year was the first year presenting an award for WTF; sadly the director of the winning film couldn't be there to receive it but she sent in a sweet video message from China. with that, we were off!

the selection this year was pretty good, though admittedly what truly makes WTF WTF is the experience of watching them with a very exuberant room full of animators. some faves: the opening song 'I have a' by Rory WT, about a man's existential anxiety, got us all clapping along very quickly; You Are Not Part Of The Cake, a grad film by Ting-Jui Chen, offered some satisfyingly stylised killing and eating of a homophobic dad and got some big cheers from the gay as hell annecy audience; Babyface by Sacha Beeley landed somewhere between adventure time and salad fingers and proved wonderfully unpredictable; Smokedog by Andrew Onorato must sit alongside Jonni Peppers's A Cat Who Smokes Weed as premises go, with the dog just being antisocial in a bunch of funny stupid ways. Pigeon Businessman was also a pretty good joke; the Korean one about broccoli curing zombies was impressively manic, and of course the Gobelins film Skin Flick was, you know, a Gobelins film, and this was a wonderful setting for slime yuri defeating the snuff film devil. and at the end, I'd Rather Be A Concorde by Javier Fabregas made very nice use of old computer game imagery. and I got to turn to the Titmouse guys and tell them they'd put together another very good programme lol. doubt they remembered me.

Nobody was one of the films I most wanted to see at the festival, after it came highly recommended by Animation Obsessive and also apparently completely blew up the Chinese internet. it's actually an expansion on one of the films we watched a couple years back on Animation Night 141. director Yu Shui, that's the guy in black...

really struck a chord with that one, and spent the years since then expanding it into a full length movie.

so what's it about? a group of yao, on the run at the bottom of the hierarchy hear about the approach of the Tang Monk from Journey to the West and get the idea to impersonate the famous group, going out ahead of them to get the Buddhist scriptures, and relying on Sun Wukong's fearsome reputation to sell the ruse. naturally it gets a lot more complicated.

it's a great premise already - a chance to interact playfully with a story everyone (at least, everyone in China) knows without ever really undermining it, while still having a very sincere emotional throughline in a story about the characters growing into their assumed roles. but what makes it go even more are the absolutely wonderful character interactions, this film just has a completely charming sense of humour through and through, perfectly paced to get enough time to really get to know these characters.

and while it's a comedy, it's still absolutely beautiful with it, full of incredible ink-wash backgrounds and fun movement - and some absolutely splendidly animated fights as well, able to seamlessly mix awesome martial arts, drama and physical comedy with the best of them. the comedy manages to make tropes like a 'special move' built up throughout the film still feel fun and fresh; the emotional depth makes the comedy work. just one of those cases of all the elements working together really really well.

in many ways this does seem like something very true to the post-Flash era Chinese animation subculture which produced directors like Busifan. it feels like it has a lot in common with e.g. Dahufa or The Legend of Hei, but its characters are a lot less... distant, I guess?

yvette spent nearly two hours queuing for it (while I had lunch and then used my res to secure us good seats lol), came out the theatre crying, and felt it was entirely worth it. her review is here

and yep yu shui stuck around after the film to chat a bit with people, sign things and even kindly posed for a photo with us...

so yeah, watch Nobody, it really is that good. in cinema ideally, it's really good on a big screen, though i have no idea if a wider western release is coming

as usual the blogging is falling further and further behind because annecy!bryn has quite a maximalist approach to the festival, and tuesday really lived up to that.

Started Tuesday with the Off-Limits block, which is where Annecy puts the sorts that are too abstract experimental for the main competition categories. as ever that makes for a pretty wild mix of stuff.

some cool ones included XYZ, which takes advantage of the repetitive architecture of what seems to be some kind of hospital or office building to create this fascinating effect with strobing match cuts, the camera gradually floating around the building in more and more complex arcs. possibly the most photosensitive epilepsy triggering film ever, but if you don't get that, hell of an experience. i came out calling it 'the architecture one' and yvette called it the 'sissy hypno one'

another very cool one was Evacuations, which set us up with a series of photos of empty spaces before filling them with flickering paint streak people with a lot of delightful visual gags. as the film advanced the backdrops fell away and the frames started layering in a really cool way.

CORE DUMP was the most directly representative one, depicting a huge swarm of scavenging drones like flies on a huge rubbish patch, from the point of view of one of those drones. pretty crazy camerawork, potentially motion sickness inducing as the drone dives into tunnels, but what a compelling image.

Merrimundi was one of the strangest, featuring a chorus of unfurling paper dolls alternating monologues about how the viewer is obsolete with songs in Latin. maybe slightly on the long side but it did get yvette to turn to me and ask 'is this what plurality is like' which was pretty funny. (i mean sure lol, good a metaphor as any)

overall: solid block, good stuff.

we're already a day behind in annecy blogging, this is going great girls x3

two films yesterday! first we had The Orbit of Minor Satellites, which is one of those tiny team idiosyncratic passion project films, similar to e.g. Jinsei last year. the film is a depicts a psychiatrist's sessions with a patient, interspersed with the story of a scifi station that she is imagining in which a group of cosmonauts attempt to establish a base on a moon of Saturn, inhabited also by a giant buffalo which speaks only in Boris Karloff sound clips. on the face of it, it sounds really intriguing; in practice it ended up kind of dragging a lot. shame but still glad to have rolled the dice on this one.

in the evening, we had Rogue Trooper, adapting the 2000AD comic, and the animation debut of Duncan Jones (the Moon guy, and also David Bowie's son it turns out??) this was just about the most 2000AD thing we've ever seen; the slightly exaggerated animation designs and the noxious planet they inhabit feel much truer to the vibe of the comic than a live action film could. this does end up having a bit of a computer game feel at times, particularly in the early sequence where the Genetic Infantry show what they're about by blowing up a gigantic city-scale tank guarded by hordes of mooks, but ultimately the film settles into its rhythm which is mostly about encountering a series of fucked up guys (and one girl).

this is a complaint that goes back to the original comic (i recall liz sandifer bringing it up in last war in albion), but the story really seems to want to have its cake and eat it on the subject of war: it is presented as a pointless war over nothing but it's also wwii in space with the southers as space tommies and the norts as something like space nazis, scary gasmasked dudes who you can kill as much as you like. not because they're doing anything uniquely evil in this setting, mind, they're just the enemy. for all that souther command is jokingly corrupt and prone to carrying out evil genetic engineering experiments, 19/rogue develops an ethic that's like 'i gotta save my brothers' and save their invasion effort from betrayal, which the narrative broadly sympathises with.

it's interesting to me how much this story parallels the much later YoRHa stage play/NieR Automata, and also how it differs. both stories are about disposable clone units sent to die needlessly in the space war; both have a conceit of soldiers getting reembodied if their mind data can be saved; both see the squad whittled down to a sole survivor who ends up in an antagonistic relationship to their command but still continues to fight the space war. but the characterisation of A2, which is about trauma and trust, is very different from the characterisation of Rogue, which is about how he's maybe a bit too much of a do-gooder but also the Coolest Guy. and notably, whatever sympathies NieR builds for its robot antagonists over the course of the story are entirely absent from Rogue Trooper.

one thing I do appreciate is that the ostensible immortality of the clone troopers turns out to be a lie, it's too expensive to keep the bodies around but they don't bother telling the clones. it never made a ton of sense that YoRHa bodies are so expensive but they've got loads of them sitting around in storage.

but yeah, this is all to say the whole thing is hilariously British about it, war is super duper hell and the lions may be led by donkeys but we sure gave jerry a good kicking didn't we lads...

but like I can't exactly complain that I went to see the sicknasty space violence movie and got a lot of sicknasty space violence. in a sense, Rogue Trooper feels like the full realisation what something like Star Wars The Clone Wars gestured at in its darker arcs, the all-consuming forever war akin to the 'Jungian parade' of The Second Renaissance. there's a lot of extremely cool acrobatic action shots. it's hard to believe that Unreal is capable of something like this, particularly all the nice volumetric smoke; we truly live in an era as far as realtime rendering is concerned.

anyway i did enjoy Venus, the cool girl with the muscles who (obvious spoiler) runs the tunneling underground bar. it's funny how macho mil-sf converges on lesbian aesthetics when it needs to have one cool girl, though the movie pretty quickly gets her flirting with one of the disembodied sorta-dead clones. apparently she's got her own comics line, i should check that out. we also got Diane Morgan (Philomena Cunk) as an evil space general, inspired casting choice there. (it uses some kind of mocap type thing to give everyone slightly caricatured, exaggerated proportions but still in a photoreal rendering style, a little uncanny but mostly it works)

it's very wild to see an expensive scifi film like this be so British with it. this feels like it will probably hit the right notes to take off, so perhaps we'll see more 2000AD adaptations down the line. nemesis the warlock anyone?

oh boy lots to note here!!

after Decorado in the morning came a little more unsuccessful queuing but then I got into the collection on war films, which in practice nearly exclusively meant films on the world wars in europe lol. these were a bit of a mix; at their best you had films like Uncanny Valley, which used the uncanny movement of pixilation (stop motion with human actors) along with distorted voices to create an incredible sense of desperation and (there it is again) dissociation, or the incredible psychedelic visuals of Mynarski Death Plummet. others like Paths of Hate were incredibly silly with it (though it is an impressive dogfight sequence).

war and death would really prove to be a theme today, in fact.

next came the main Short Films 1, which I got very lucky getting into in the queues. for the most part these were bangers; we even had a new film by Don Hetzfeldt, a very clever concept with a beautiful execution and a very sharp payoff. the idea is a human life depicted in the marks made on paper, from the earliest scribbles through learning to write, tests, letters... it's remarkable how expressive and clean hertzfeldt is able to make this; i assume he had some software help but regardless, it's an incredibly cool effect. i won't spoil where it goes here but it's powerful.

also immensely striking was Zsuzsanna Kreif's film Adgwa-Ata about the surreal ritual of a lesbian tf snake hypnosis cult, which has some absolutely incredible imagery. the cult are all depicted in this drag-influenced uniform with huge platform heels and incredibly long nails; they have some kind of connection to the plane of orbs, and the film depicts three girls being abducted to partake of the snake ritual.

I was all ready to go tell Yvette about how many absolute bangers this set had, but the last one, Danse Macabre, made the screening extra spicy. the film apparently involves 75 oil paintings, created over an eleven year period, combined with 3D and rotoscope to create an oil painted look in animation... by means of some kind of AI system, plus manual cleanup. viewed on a purely technical level this is probably the best I've seen such tools achieve; it has good temporal consistency and a consistent aesthetic and animation. but, this is the annecy festival and by this point, AI has gone from a novelty to a genuine threat, so this went down like an anvil. after a smattering of applause people started loudly booing; someone got in a shouting match with the director ("shame on you annecy festival!"), who gave up and gave the finger. I've never seen anything like it at Annecy, though I heard something similar happened last year.

tbh I can see where everyone is coming from. however defensible this film may be in isolation, nobody wants animation to go the way software development has been.

so what was this film even about? well, a huge army of skeletons descends on a city and executes the people by firing squad; having done this, the skeletons then start killing each other, rank after rank. if it was actually a metaphor for AI it would be painfully on the nose.

I did not get in to Welcome to Dolly's House; Yvette did and she says I didn't miss much. I went to the VR room instead, which is on a new 'reserve an hour and sample what you like' system this year, which seems like an improvement. I played an aesthetically very cool but technically kinda jank one about a gay couple lucid dreaming, which did some cool reprojection effects; and one about floods in Australia which was quite interesting in that it made all its assets out of paper. there's some intriguing looking stuff so I'll be back there tomorrow.

made it in to see Alberto Vazquez's new film Decorado! oldschool Animation Night-heads may remember his other films like Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (aka Psiconautas in Spanish) and Unicorn Wars, which we watched on Animation Night 178-9. like those other two films, Decorado is an elaboration on one of Vazquez's short films, which you can see here:

The structure of the short, with every scene ending in the chorus invoking 'Decorado', wouldn't quite work as a full length film, and so the narrative here is less fragmentary; nevertheless, it's pretty similar. Like Birdboy, we have a decaying dystopia in which everyone is miserably poor and getting by on shitty drugs, surrounded by impassable terrain and garbage. here, though, we have a more explicit pseudo-antagonist in the omnipresent ALMA corporation. it's a cartoon of an evil corp, but that's kind of the point; the whole thing is set up to feel derealising, and it's never quite clear what is diegetically 'real' or staged as earlier scenes are recontextualised.

there's an interesting repurposing of the 'big scary bird' imagery from Birdboy, here overtly antagonistic; the splattery gore of Unicorn Wars makes an understated return as well, lots of very abrupt and nasty deaths. with the sense of artificiality over everything and quite archetypal characters, and particularly the way it seemed to be approaching homeless characters, i wasn't entirely convinced it was going to work as well as birdboy at first, which did a great job of establishing sympathy for its kids, but it came together.

i enjoyed how the ending played with some of the cornier, 'only love is real' type endings of this type of dystopian movie. admittedly the only answer a lot of movies like this, which meticulously close off the idea of escape, seem to have is to get a bit weird and spiritual with it. but i mean, it's better to admit when you don't have an answer in this way, right?

it was interesting seeing explicit use of psychiatric terms like derealisation here.