!VAR HAGENDOORN

Holland Animation Film festival 2004

As a choreographer I am bound by human anatomy and the laws of physics. I cannot just add or remove an arm or have a dancer simply disappear and if I want someone to move from one place on stage to another my choices are limited. In animation films anything is possible. Dolls can come to life, nails can take on human characteristics trying to hide from the hammer that is about to hit them, lines can turn into figures and to the dismay of the character that has just been drawn, the hand of the artist can take the piece of paper, crush it and throw it into the bin.

In “What is Philosophy?” French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari define art as a compound of percepts and affects. This definition applies particularly well to animated films. In animated films metaphors, verbs, adjectives and expressions are rendered visible, revealing not so much their essence, but their affective dimension, the sensation of stopping, of being lost in a big city, of disillusion, rage, surprise, disintegrating, getting blown away or being torn apart. After seeing Shredder by Adriaan Lokman you “know” or “sense” what “shredding” means. With its “oily” colors and its contorted shapes “Car craze” by Evert de Beijer renders visible the sensation of suffocating in a town dominated by cars.

As Canadian filmmaker Chris Landreth said in an interview talking about his phenomenal animated short Ryan, “What we found was most important was to pay attention to emotions and thought processes. For example, you can see this in one particular scene where Ryan thinks for about twenty seconds and then says ‘What?!’. In those twenty seconds, you see him squirming, moving his shoulders, and kind of nodding slightly. We were trying to give the impression that there was a deep thought process happening there.”

Every other year the biennial Holland Animation Film Festival shows a selection of some of the best independent animation films of the past two or three years as well as a number of retrospectives and thematic programs. If I am around I like to spend a day or so at the festival to have my mind stretched and my imagination triggered. With several hundreds of films in various categories it is impossible to cover the entire festival, so here are some personal highlights of this year’s festival.

Ryan by Chris Landreth is a deeply moving and visually astonishing documentary animated in 3D about Canadian animator Ryan Larkin. Once a celebrated filmmaker whose work was nominated for an Oscar, Ryan Larkin descended into drugs and alcohol and ended up begging on the streets of Montréal.

In Ryan, which is based on some 20 hours of actual interview footage, an animated Landreth interviews Larkin in a rundown cafetaria populated by freaky characters, one of whom is flattened out on a table. Landreth portrays Ryan as a disintegrated, incomplete figure, with only parts of his head, hands, arms and body visible. Life has literally gnawed at him. Landreth himself has also received some blows from life but that, as he says in the opening scene, is another story. At one point Landreth, whose emotions show through the hands reaching out from his face towards Ryan, asks the wrong question. Ryan literally explodes, turning into a demon with multicolored spikes coming out of his face. Landreth has ingeniously woven into his film two of Larkin’s critically acclaimed shorts from the early 70s, images of Larkin's former self, his old girlfriend and his producer. The film is so rich in detail you have to see it more than once.

In by German filmmaker Philipp Hirsch is hard to classify and I’m still trying to figure out what it was all about. Hanna has to decide. But about what? A naked girl runs through the woods. Something is hiding underneath the foliage hanging over a mountain stream. Abstract organic shapes that are at once three and two dimensional dissolve when two parts make contact. We are led through a three dimensional system of tunnels populated by one footed creatures. A boy’s underpants. The girl is lying on the grass. She looks at the tiny underpants in her hands. We turn inside outside inwards to emerge outside again. And somehow it all makes sense. It is as if the inner contortions of an existential dilemma are visualized. “Hanna. It’s about your belly again. Lena or Dave, you have to decide” a male voice says. Who is Lena? Who is Dave? We are left to fill in the blanks, haunted by the eerie and beautiful images Hirsch has created. Maybe this is what thinking and deciding look like. Maybe.

In Birthday Boy by South-Korean filmmaker Sejong Park a little boy rummages about in what turns out to be the remains of a plane that has crashed into a building. He emerges with a screw and runs down to a railway where he places it on the track. In the distance a train is approaching. It is carrying tanks. It is 1951, the time of the Korean war. When the train has passed the little boy picks up the flattened screw and holds it a distance from another piece of iron. The boy smiles. It’s magnetic. He continues his way home, running, hiding and playing soldier on his own. The town looks desolate. There is no one else to play with. When he arrives home he finds a parcel on the doorsteps. He opens it and takes out a medallion on a necklace and an old boot. He puts on the necklace and parades in front of the house, holding a stick against his shoulder as if it were a gun. Then he goes to his room to play with the toy tanks and fighter planes he has made out of the scrap metal he has found on the streets. In the final scene we hear his mother arrive home, cheerfully greeting him, unaware of the news that awaits her.

In less than 10 minutes Sejong Park manages to give a vivid portrayal of the effects of war. The film is largely carried by the storyline and yet if it hadn’t been animated it would have had far less impact. The 3D technique employed by Sejong Park allowed him to exaggerate the characteristics of nearly all of the films features, from the boy’s innocence to the desolate landscape and the gentleness with which he treats the screw.

Other highlights included the third part of Phil Mulloy's trilogy “Intolerance”, this year's Oscar Award winning short Harvie Krumpet by Adam Elliot, The dog who was a cat inside by Siri Melchior about, well, I think you guessed it, What Barry Says by Simon Robson, which employs the language of stencil art and 50s propaganda movies to create a compelling critique of U.S. foreign policy and “Le Portefeuille” by Vincent Bierrewaerts about a man who finds a wallet and then splits into two persons, one walks past it, the other picks it up, one spends the money, the other tries to return it to its owner... The aforementioned “Shredder” by Adriaan Lokman and “Car craze” by Evert de Beijer were also shown at this year's festival.

Related

Holland Animation Film Festival 2010

Holland Animation Film Festival 2009

Holland Animation Film Festival 2008