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.
an incredible few hours of films; the combination of last year's addition of the Midnight Shorts block and this year's horror theme is just so good. I might have more to say on all the themes and what makes horror animation effective once I'm home. (I didn't quite get to see every one of the horror theme blocks, I'll have to try to track the rest down when I'm home.)
