The film follows a wayward plastic grocery bag: sentient and voiced by Werner Herzog to amazing effect, as it searches for meaning to its existence. It is a heavy subject—existential angst—and in the form of a plastic bag’s personification, definitely absurd. However for the most part the film takes itself and its concept seriously, albeit with occasional breaks for wry humor. The result is a film that is a success as education and entertainment; one that musters a startling amount of pathos from its subject and a surprising amount of empathy from its audience.

Ramin Bahrani, has developed quite a reputation on the basis of his three feature films: Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo and Man Push Cart, which all turn a humanistic eye to the American immigrant experience. This attitude coupled with his frequent use of non-actors, has lead some to classify him as something of a neo-neorealist. Thus on first blush it is strange to see him tackle a high-concept work such as this. However the same skills that prove successful in his features buoy Plastic Bag: a broad and sympathetic understanding of interior worlds, and a photographer’s eye for natural beauty in the exterior world.

The script that Herzog works with, and his interaction with it are a triumph. The charming foreignness of his Germanic handling of English is endearing, and establishes the Plastic Bag as sympathetic in its naivete. It is the same trope of the good-natured but confused traveler which allows films like Coming to America or Borat to succeed. It also allows for subtle and wry humor to break up the oppressing sadness of the piece. The bag’s recurring use of “monsters” to address non-human creatures is reliably funny. It additionally mines powerful archetypes of quests and journeys. His long attempts to find home slowly morph into a goal of discovering “the vortex”. Language is key here and serves as a testament to the script. The plastic bag prophets, “preaching” of the vortex, are powerful myth-making elements.

This outsider approach, while investing us in an all-too-human story, subtly reinforces the ecological undercurrents of the film. Via a process of estrangement, Plastic Bag allows us to see, through the plastic bag’s experience, our own world via new eyes. A world, eventually, without humans at all.

This investment in an inanimate material’s subjectivity can be accused of bordering on manipulative. However is it any different than Wall-E, another film with a similar environmentalist message? Perhaps the difference is the medium—the animation of Wall-E necessarily puts us at an additional remove, pushing us closer into the more comfortable embrace of fantasy. Bahrani’s cinematography however revels in the real, via picturesque landscapes of skyscrapers and plains, and closeups of fishes and beaches. Either way the imagery is quite lovely, serving up a engaging mix of artfully composed long shots and closeups with dreamy-soft shallow DOF.

The beauty of the images buttress the interior journey of the bag, reflecting its mental state in nature. Yet like the script itself, these images serve the dual purpose of engaging the ecological message through its simple and dramatic representation of our world. An elegy for what is ours, and, in the story, what it is we will eventually lose.

The best entry of Future States, a whole series of films commissioned by ITVS, Plastic Bag is a confident and polished piece of art that successfully navigates these two simultaneous threads: the interior and the exterior, humanity and nature, the particular and the environmental. It accomplishes both these angles with aplomb in a quite moving whole. I very much like this film and hope you take the time to enjoy it as well.

So when he goes out of his way to recommend a short filmmaker, especially one outside of an “anime aesthetic” I make sure to make time for it. Following his enthusiastic recommendation I found Way Home.

Way Home follows the story of a persistent dung beetle. Upon discovery of a auspiciously large prize of excrement, the film details his dogged attempts to bring home the “bacon”, i.e. poo, to his wife and child. Touching ^_^.

The film is rather sentimental in that regard, but there is a lot of other things going. There are challenges and difficulties that present themselves, thus requiring perseverance from our enterprising dung beetle, but they are not of the heroic variety per se. There is a sense of whimsicality and humor in the classic cartooning aesthetic on display in the dung beetle’s motions and gesticulations, evidenced by the way he contorts his body to the task of moving the prodigious dung-ball,  outsized yet minimalist expressions on its face betraying the effort involved.  But while this style and the vague anthropomorphism of the character design are reminiscent of classic American comedic animation, in Way Home the humor is not an end unto itself. There is a palpable passing of time that is portrayed, and thus the film surprisingly tilts towards the elegiac, becoming a meditation on work and striving and—ridiculously enough—the nature of being.

The background design is hint enough of this more melancholy intention. The dramatic use of contrast and shadow in all its minimalistic glory and supplemented by pastels, is gorgeous and provides the opportunity for some stunning compositions. Yet this starkness and focus on natural beauty necessarily draws one mind up towards contemplation. Additionally one versed in modern animation cannot help but feel the influence of Michael Dudok du Wit in this style, which, through reference, imbues the film with a certain sadness. My suspicions were confirmed by an interview Mr. Oh gave to AniBoom where he credits Dudok du Wit as an inspiration.

Ultimately Way Home, is a holistic and moving short film. Oh, by recombining established animation techniques presents a unique perspective in hand drawn animation through an original and beautiful aesthetic. More so, he inspires in this film, through tone and content, a philosophical examination of nature and being that I won’t spoil here, but I definitely carried with me afterwords.

Magnetic Movie makes the ambitious attempt to visualize the intangible discoveries of today’s best scientists. Their explanations lay score to scenes of empty labs where these discoveries play out as erratic experiments that slowly grow out of control—a fitting analogy to the discoveries themselves.

A Sundance 10/10 film: now online

“If her web be art, then she is an artist of symmetry who walks on air…”

The simple, child-like illustration style draws much from Bourgeois’ spindly sculptures. The Spider won a 356: AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) Award for motion graphics this year (where I found it online), so it speaks well to my design-conscious side. The motion is well-choreographed, moving and morphing in time and breaking dimensional boundaries at key moments to create a visual style who’s perceived simplicity is broken by a deep and textural world teeming just beneath the surface.

“And if it is true that the great themes are death and love, then surely she is preoccupied with greatness.”

The filmmaker, Juan Delcan (Nola Pictures), has said he’s interested in expanding this idea to other contemporary poems—perhaps enough for a feature.

After recently abandoning a four-person collaborative project, student animators Heui Won Jeong and Justin Murphy were striving to find an idea to kickstart a new work. The day they went to see Roscoe Mitchell playing at the Vancouver Jazz Festival, Heui Won remarked that he sounded like a wild animal when soloing. Well, it wasn’t a moonlit night, but their dream began its existence that day.

Nine months of grueling work with After Effects, Final Cut, Photoshop and Premiere led to the birth of JumpTrumpRumpBump, a lovely animated short film telling the story of six year-old Mooney. By day, she is an over-achieving little girl living with her Grandparents at their junkyard in the forest. By night, Mooney is a member of a secret jazz band with a group of ex-convict animals.

The use of (digitally animated) cutouts and hand drawn figures, showcase a delightful depiction of Mooney’s fantasies working to “earnestly to give people a positive view of the future and the world”, in the words of the creators. The combination of different media gives the short a look that is childish and “smart” at the same time.

With the concept being inspired by jazz, the music clearly plays a significant role in JumpTrumpRumpBump, and serendipity played a huge role in finding the right tune which matched the intent of the filmmakers and the personalities of the characters. According to the filmmakers they worked with student musicians for nearly 4 months trying to nail down a piece of music that fit their vision for the project, to no avail. Only after scouring the afro-cuban jazz scene in Vancouver were they able to find a bassist to help them. He allowed the use of a song he had written 14 years ago, and recruited a who’s who of the scene to accompany. In 3 hours they hammered out what is heard in the film. The importance of the music to the film is further explored in a great essay by the Sound Designer Hank Shih.

Also, as suggested by the spinning symbol in the end, recycling (in a broad sense) is a theme that permeates throughout the movie. Mooney builds lamps out of a cooking pot; she and her grandfather build wind turbines to generate power; even on a human level—the jazz band is formed by ex-convicts. A lesson then, that even though we feel surrounded by things we don’t want to live with (just like Mooney’s house is surrounded by a junkyard) it’s possible to make it all into something useful, or even beautiful.

While the first half of the movie is almost silent, Mooney is finally able to join her friends, at which time the jazz sextet kicks in and they keep doing their thing while everyone joins in on the jam. And just as the radio captures their music and brings it to people far (and not so far), for their joy and amusement, fulfilling a dream, such as seeing a remarkable project like JumpTrumpRumpBump through to the end, can inspire those around us to take a step forward themselves.

And even though there is no real ending to this simple story which you’re about to enjoy in a colorful (or should I say soundful?) way, we can just keep dreaming with Mooney, can’t we?

The NFB Focus on Animation site is wonderful for its educational content as well as its film collection, with a superb series of articles documenting key techniques, films and filmmakers in the history of animation. Le Paysagiste is a perfect representative of what the NFB site has to offer. Created in 1976 using an obscure technique known as pinscreen animation, Le Paysagiste is considered by many the crowning achievement of the rare, but beautiful form. Instead of simply hosting the film, the sites supplementary articles represent some of the best resources for information about both pinscreen animation and the filmmaker.

At its essence, pinscreen works through shadow. A screen is poked through with groups of “pins” that can be moved in and out, and then is lit from the side. When sticking out, the pins cast a long shadow, which creates black on the screen. When pushed in, they cause no shadow and create white. Intermediate distances create different lengths of shadow and white, allowing for a whole scale of gray.

The results are what you see in Le Paysagiste, a beautiful tapestry that looks like charcoal sketches put in motion. Drouin exploits this impressionistic form in order to create a stream of conscious tour through the mind of an artist. In the film an artist is painting a lovely landscape when he finds himself able to step into the picture. Entering into this foreign world that is in fact his own, he begins a tour of psychological symbolism and random association, as objects and settings twist and morph around him.

The fleeting, transitory nature of the images belies the intense and meticulous work needed to create them. Pinscreen is a very labor-intensive technique, which is a big reason for why it has been virtually abandoned as an art. The NFB’s Focus on Animation site though reclaims and highlights historically vital works such as Le Paysagiste, making it a great resource for animation lovers.

With a minimalist approach to animation, Scotish animator, Sharon Colman, is capable of saying much with very little. She explains her process: “I always wanted to approach animation from a traditional illustrative angle,” she says. “I’m amused by the peculiar and absurdity of human nature, and developed an interest in character and their physiological makeup.” (Source: NFTS)