Review of short films on the festival circuit, including our film The Way to Heaven

I missed last year's independent animated shorts submitted to the Nashville Film Fest, but this year I made it a point to try and see it when it airs on my day off or after my shift. And I feel fortunate that I was able to see these shorts this year, because there is a lot of different ways to animated a story that I haven’t even discovered yet!

For those of you that don’t know how these film fests work, any “shorts” segment features a collection of short films that have a running theme. For example, there is a collection of shorts called “Men Behaving Badly” featuring short films about men being… well, men. For “Sensational Animation,” the shorts submitted to the fest are just that. They are sensational and beautiful if not innovative.

Unfortunately, not all of the shorts were shown, but I’ll talk about what was shown at my screening.

The opening short was Death Row Diet by Mike Salva. This Flash animated short features Jonathan Katz voicing a Death Row inmate who was turned down by Weight Watchers as a potential spokes model. It’s pretty much your standard Comedy Central animated short, but the punch line is worth the wait. There wasn’t anything innovated here, especially if you’ve seen as much Flash animation on the internet as the average YouTube user.

Q&A (Tim & Mike Rauch) features an child with Asperger’s Syndrome interviewing his mother about how his mental condition affected what she was expecting to do as a parent. It’s a very sincere short, and definitely one of the most colorful. It looked as if the images were painted with art markers. You know, the kind that don’t bleed through the paper but still be bright. The image I found from the short doesn’t show it very well, but the outlines of the characters are really smooth, almost as if it was drawn over with pens. It’s definitely one for those that like their cartoons with a lot of bright colors and for those that love heartfelt and honest dialogue that only a parent can give their child.

Runaway (Cordell Baker) is a Canadian short film about what happens to a passenger train after it has a run-in with a cow that wondered on the tracks. Let me just say that it gets pretty ridiculous, with only a small commentary on the economic social class and status quo disguised as humor. The interesting thing about this short is the way it is animated. The studio animated this used a version of the multiplane that actually gives the animation a 3D effect without the use of 3D glasses! I’m not kidding you! There is a scene shortly after the train hits the cow (but doesn’t kill it) where the engine room is rocking all over the screen, and it actually feels like you are rocking with it. It’s a really difficult thing to describe on text, but animation fans should definitely check this one out for what they did here.

Leonardo (Jim Capobianco) features a humorous look at Di Vinci’s research in to flight mechanics. The character takes an Icarus-like approach, which results in some rather comedic gags. What’s really interesting about this film is that every so often, a frame will pop with notes about the character animation. Conceptually, this short is suppose to make it look like the viewer is watching Di Vinci’s sketches come to life. The Pixar animator even left the exposure sheet numbers in the corners of several of the sequences that were animated in the film! This is definitely a short for those that like to see unclean pencil test animation.

By far one of the longest shorts, if there is such a thing, in the collection is the Chinese film The Way to Heaven (Mier Tang begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting & Dalton Grant Jr.). The story is that an elephant god is on his way to his dragon god’s home in heaven when he is distracted by the plight of the human race below. Because of his distraction, he falls off the nimbus cloud that was carrying him and is stuck on Earth. He then discovers that he has the power to spread left throughout the barren land. After doing so, the humans give him thanks. But his dragon god master isn’t too pleased about this and demands he comes back home. When the elephant god refuses, the dragon kills him and turns him into a mountain. This is probably the most beautiful film I’ve seen animated. It starts out as a traditional 2D animation a kin to Samurai Jack, but ends up into a CGI piece that incorporates real life photographs of locations throughout rural China. Dare I say it is the most spiritual film I’ve seen that wasn’t trying to be overtly religious in its methods.

Immediately after that, we were shown a film from Latvia called Wings and Oars (Vladimir Leschiov). I have to be honest, I didn’t much care for this film. It looked like it was heavily influenced by the French symbolism film crap that only the most pretentious independent film viewer would see and understand as part of some ritual to claim bragging rights. I talked to another person after the screening about this film, and the best she could determine is that is was a symbolic short about a man getting out of a loveless relationship to pursue a life passion. It’s better than what I got out of it, which was nothing.

In order to bring humor back into the screening, we were then shown the Don Hertzfeldt short Wisdom Teeth. If you haven’t seen any of his shorts, look them up, because they are really disturbing and funny at the same time. How he gets it to work out that way is just something you need to see to understand. In this short film, his unfortunate victim lets a friend pull one of his wisdom teeth stitches out of his mouth only to discover that it is connected to something unexpected. The punch line of this short literally left the audience at my screening going “What the hell did I just watch?!”

After that mind fuck, we were shown a shadow puppet short from Sweden titled Dreams from the Woods (Johannes Nyholm). I don’t know how a shadow puppet play would qualify as animation, but for what it’s worth, it’s still a beautiful short film. Don’t ask me what it is about, because I got very little out of it other than a story about some girl going away to school only to be found dead in the woods after a rain storm. But still, it was a beautiful short.



The Spine (Chris Landreth) help bring the humor back into the screening while keeping the heady conceptual stuff going. It’s a short film about marriage council meetings. In the film, each couples problems are represented symbolically by how their own characters are designed. One girl’s boyfriend is so unemotional towards her that he appears as a wooden mannequin, for example. The short focuses on a couple who couldn’t produce a child and the emotional impact it has had on their marriage. The husband has become soft and meek, and it shows in how he is animated with skin that is constantly peeling. The wife is upset with how fat she’s become due to failed fertility treatment that she ends up projecting all that frustration onto her husband. This film, if nothing else, is best appreciated for the design of the characters. The story is simple to follow, but what really grabs your attention are the character designs. That, and when the husband actually grows back his spine as a sign of showing he’s regained his self confidence. It’s a beautiful sequence.

Lightheaded (Mike Dacko) is an interesting short in that it is about the creation of life, death, finding immortality, and the search for other life forms. All because someone lit a candle, which caused drops of wax to be animated into sentient beings. Basically, it’s one of those art films that is easy to understand, beautiful to look at, but offers nothing in innovation. It kind of reminded me of a Pixar short they would produce to test their new software before their big feature.

Ren & Stimpy animator Nick Cross submitted a short film called Yellow Cake. While trying to find an image to post of the short, I stumbled upon his blog entry about the film stating that it was going to be a “Direct-to-Internet” release. He shopped it around to the various film fests just to generate more views, but the entire film can be viewed online. You can watch it below, thanks to his Vimeo channel.