Animated Shorts

Why, you say, would I attend the New York International Children’s Film Festival? Why, indeed. Well, see, I have this film editor nephew who recently worked on an animated short that was entered in the competition. Sounds simple enough, huh? It was simple enough and pleasurable enough but I probably should have limited myself to half the 17 or 18 films I managed to see. Both animated and live action, their length was anywhere from five or six minutes to maybe 15 or 20. They were an eclectic mix and, as you might imagine, as different from each other as is humanly possible. There were quite a few foreign films and I found it cool that not only were they subtitled, but the subtitles were also read aloud to accommodate the less-literate in the crowd. I would say that 75% of the audience was children with an average age somewhere around 10; with some attention deficit disorder problems in the lower registers. You could certainly tell which films were successful by the roar of the silence or the lack thereof. They also handed out ballots so you could have a hand in determining the best of the best at the awards ceremony at the end of the festival. This is a might touchy I would think because what’s goose for a five year old is gander for a teenager. Some of them were definitely not, in my opinion, kids movies. Just because there are kids in them doesn’t make it so (that little match girl still freezes to death at the end). Anyway, I certainly had my favorites. The one that killed me is called Flatlife (I’d love to see this about five more times because there’s so much going on).
A close second is called Guide Dog and these two films would tie in any Oscar contest in which I decided the winner. They are both animated (in entirely different styles) and really shouldn’t be in competition with live action films, or even each other for that matter. In fact, there shouldn’t even be a competition; they are already juried and deemed worthy so why can’t they just leave it at that? Oh, right, that’s not the American way…ya gotta award a “winner” to make the “good tries” feel bad. It was an interesting afternoon and really does show what we are missing these days at the multiplexes. What’s it take to program in a six-ten minute cartoon anyway?