Ottawa International Animation Festival: Part 1

As the best in animation makes its way to Ottawa, Josh is on the ground to cover some of the best animated shorts from this year! See reviews below from 2 of his favourites, Beautiful Men and Entropic Memory as well as a review of Circle from Brandon.

Beautiful Men, dir. Nicolas Keppens

Belgian director Nicolas Keppens’ new film Beautiful Men finds the three Van Goethem brothers, Steven, Bart and Koen, going to Istanbul, Turkey for hair transplants. “Men file in and out to rid themselves of their insecurities,” the despondent hotel clerk explains, checking in yet another bald man. The vulnerable brothers, each undergoing an identity crisis are not just searching for a new look on their heads but a new outlook on life. But after an overheard conversation leads to a misunderstanding, the brothers’ insecurities and resentments grows faster than their hair.

The intricate stop-motion puppets crafted by Pedri Animation go a long way toward creating empathy for these beautiful men; it is like these are real people we are looking at. From the little pockets on their jeans, minuscule hats and glasses (and, yes, their tiny little full-frontal nudity) every single aspect of these puppets is crafted to perfection. We come to know these men as if they are our friends, with real hopes and dreams, although the reveal of the result of the hair transplants is the jump scare of the year.

The richly thematic—and very adult—subject of Beautiful Men is an exemplar of Guillermo del Toro’s often-repeated maxim about animation, "Animation is not a genre for kids. It's a medium for art, it's a medium for film, and I think animation should stay in the conversation." This is a film that is about something. It slowly reveals its ideas about masculinity, about men’s susceptibility to beauty standards, about the Van Goethem brothers’ worries for their health, about fear and growing old. The ennui and loneliness that the brothers feel in their journey might find its closest animated counterpoint in the delusional sadness that the characters experienced in Charlie Kaufman’s 2015 masterpiece Anomalisa.

The art direction and décors, also by Keppens, create an incredibly detailed and minutely accurate Turkey (Keppens also did the set decoration for another animated favourite from this year, The Miracle, from director Nienke Deutz). From the drab and lonely interiors of the anonymous hotel rooms the brothers stay in, to the liminal spaces of staircases, hallways and restaurant booths the brothers wander through, to the ornate warmth of the Turkish baths, each set is so precisely modeled that it looks like Keppens took a full-sized Istanbul and shrunk it down to puppet size. Moody and atmospheric, Istanbul becomes increasingly foggy throughout the brothers’ visit, from the steamy baths of the local hammam to the smoky hotel lobby, casting a dolorous haze over the whole film.

Beautiful Men is Keppens’ first stop motion animated project; all his previous films have been traditionally 2d animated. Drawing on his background in painting and sculpture, the characters that he creates are literally and figuratively in three dimensions; just as we see these real men walking down a real hallway, we feel and understand their histories and desires, a completely drawn picture of these beautiful men’s lives in only 19 achingly poetic minutes.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

Entropic Memory, dir. Nicolas Brault

In 2012, Nicolas Brault embarked on a trilogy of non-narrative short films around the human body, each using different animation techniques and focused on a different aspect of the body. Squame explores the body’s sensitive envelope, the skin, and its ephemeral animated desquamations. Squame’s sugar casts of skin, somewhere between archeological artifacts and macroscopic observations, evoke fragile landscapes. The second film, Foreign Bodies was created using CT, MRI, and cryosection, paintings created with the video light of modern medical imaging. These films made landscapes of human bodies and instilled a sense of strangeness that our own bodies can sometimes inspire. 

Now, Brault turns to an enigmatic part of the human body that is perhaps the hardest to understand and to capture—memory. Entropic Memory, the third and final film in the trilogy is a photographic exploration of family photo albums. To create this moving, evocative film, Brault used several photo albums that he found ravaged by flood water. They evoke hazy and indistinct memories, poignant witnesses of a fragile past.

The exploration of the albums starts with the cover, still dripping with beads of water as if it had just been plucked from the flood water moments before. The rectangular sticker that would have held a family named or dates, no longer stuck to the front, but loosely sliding down the front. The pages of the album are swollen and soggy, pushing past the edges of the cover, no longer rigid and square but ragged and torn, bringing an almost ornate beauty to the liminal space that it occupies, somewhere between presence and absence, between remembering and forgetting. 

The coils that hold the book together are brittle and jagged, bits of red-black rust flaking the turned pages of the album. The photos, when they are slowly, eventually revealed, are too water damaged, too faded to make out whose images they are. Who were the people in these photos? What were they commemorating? We can assign our own meaning to the hollowed-out space that these lost images left behind. Were they birthday parties? Lost loves? A drip of water down the damp page suggests the outline of a woman’s face… or maybe not. Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of Entropic Memory is that it doesn’t show, as if when the photos took on water, they lost their meaning. 

At the film’s premiere as an Official Selection of the Off-Limits section at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Entropic Memory played in a Stereoscopic version, adding further depth to the tactile macrophotography. Entropic Memory doesn’t force a commentary or intend any answer to the questions raised by the faded photos, instead it functions almost purely as a mysterious aesthetic experience. All of this is methodically categorized in beautiful stop motion, the pages turned as if by some unseen hand, an invisible someone leafing through the memories of their past and finding only disintegration and decay.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

Circle, dir. Joung Yu-mi

Circle, directed by Joung Yu-mi has unmatched aesthetic right from the title card. A girl draws a perfect circle in the middle of the screen and the symmetrical title card appears above. The point of view stays there, still the whole time as we watch different characters enter the scene.

Circle is drawn out in all black and white, and despite being fairly minimalist with the action mostly occurring in one spot, it is ever so intricate. The detail in the shading and the layering of both the people accumulating in the circle and their shadows is a sight to behold.

Joung definitely uses the most of a very small space. As more and more people enter the screen you become unsure of how they will even fit into the circle. But somehow they always do. The sound design is also minimal but effective and pleasing in an ASMR type of way.

As a society we live within boundaries. So often it appears that there is freedom but societal roles and rules may hold us in place, trapping us, without us knowing we are trapped. Sometimes these rules are needed to keep order but maybe in some cases it might be better if someone came around to erase our preconceived ideas so we are free to continue on the path to growth and breaking barriers.

Circle had its world premiere at Berlinale and has continued it’s festival run throughout the year at many major festivals including Annecy and now Ottawa.

Review by: Brandon MacMurray