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Quality shorts for our youngest audience members are surprisingly hard to come by! Shorts filmmakers skew younger and perhaps they are driven by a youthful desire to prove their maturity via their art? Maybe. Also, while there is certainly a market for all-ages animation, the animators in our orbit have grown up fighting a generations-old perception that animation is solely kid’s stuff. So, of course, we’ll see three outrageously mature animated shorts submitted to us for every all-ages piece.
I’m shooting from the hip when it comes to these observations and hypotheses, but I feel confident in asserting that family-friendly work is too often overlooked and we’re certainly a guilty party in that. In an otherwise quiet week in short film, we pause to highlight quality work suitable for the short filmmakers of the future. First, though, this week’s S/W picks.
📅 This Week on Short of the Week
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Well isn’t this a treat! We’ve had a bumper stretch of established directors releasing shorts, with Wes Anderson’s recent Oscar win serving as the punctuation mark on the trend. But, even within that context, the idea that the director of Ichi the Killer would adapt a story by the Godfather of Manga (Osamu Tezuka) and shoot it on an iPhone as branded content for one of the richest corporations on earth was…not on my bingo card!
Rob is taken by this improbable creation when describing the short: “Featuring adrenaline-fueled fight scenes, exhilarating car chases, and even a puppet that shoots laser beams, the film serves as a captivating introduction to Miike’s innovative filmmaking style, a heartfelt tribute to manga, and a bold, high-concept standalone creation.”
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Nominated for France’s César Award in 2022, the power of Paul Mas’ storytelling easily stuck with us in the interim and we jumped to feature it when we saw it pop up online this month. In heart-rending fashion, Mas isolates an all-too-common moment in childhood when compassion and self-preservation are in opposition. Julie, an awkward outsider, finds companionship with Emile, a special-needs boy who joins her class. Emile is quickly identified as an outcast by their schoolmates though and an easily miscontrued event poses Julie with a poignant dilemma. In interviews, Mas reveals his desire to delve into the origins of exclusionary behaviour in the young, and pinpoint that critical “tipping point” where individuals begin to sacrifice parts of their empathy in order to navigate their environment.
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Two S/W alums, Sandrine Brodeur-Desrosiers and Carmine Pierre-Dufour, join forces to co-direct this mother/daughter drama “where the silences weigh heavier than the dialogue.”
Céline handles the review of this exquisitely written and performed short adapted from a story by the Quebecois writer Monique Proulx which premiered at TIFF 2021. The directors remark that they were drawn to the material in hopes of authentically depicting a, “mother and daughter duo who clearly love one another but struggle to communicate it.”
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Eugene Kolb, the talent behind a series of innovative and essayistic animated documentaries, again mines his personal life with this fascinating short that explores the still-existing taboo around masturbation.
Spurred by a scam email that threatens to release covertly recorded webcam footage of Kolb masturbating, the filmmaker uses the experience as a jumping off point to survey the attitudes of his friends. Serafima writes our review, noting that, while masturbation is assumed behavior in our contemporary sex-positive culture, the film “holds an introspective magnifying glass to our sexual routines, and the result is delightful and thought-provoking in equal measures.”
🪐 Shortverse Collections
I spent Sunday taking my 6-year-old to the New York International Children’s Festival’s “Best of Fest” screening, which is becoming our annual tradition. Last year’s edition was his first time at a film festival and he loved it! He especially enjoyed (the still unreleased) Luce and the Rock from S/W alum Britt Raes, and I actually saw my favorite short of the year there too—the stunning Architect A (건축가 A) from Korean studio VCRWORKS (which I shouted out in Talking Shorts’ annual ”Top 3” roundup).
So it was a funny suprise to me that, without any coordination, my fellow member of the S/W Dad Club, Rob Munday, put together a Family Friendly Animation collection for Shortverse this week. 15 shorts perfect to watch with the kids in your life (or if you’re a kid at heart). It’s a nice of mix of old and new, with some highlights including a tear-jerking viral hit, an impressive homage to classic animations past, and a funny fairy tale from Filip Diviak whose latest short happened to be my child’s favorite from this year’s NYICFF. ^_^
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🍿 New releases you’ve been enjoying…
A delightfully absurd queer fantasy that played spots like SXSW, Outfest, and NYICFF, this sparkly charmer found an appreciative audience in filmmaker Olivia Griselda who writes:
That’s all for this week’s edition! Thanks for reading, we’ll be back next Friday with more