Got “Milk Teeth”? | Tibor Banoczki’s animated short definitely doesn’t play the “cute” card.
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THE BEST OF THE OTTAWA ANIMATION
FESTIVAL 2007
Various directors. Mar 7-10. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel).
3 1/2 Stars
Just about every feature-length cartoon Hollywood has produced over the last three years has been a computer-animated story about talking animals. Of course, no genre that’s produced Ratatouille can be all bad, but it’s invigorating to finish watching The Best of the Ottawa Animation Festival 2007 (a compendium of prizewinners and finalists from the largest animation showcase in North America) and realize that no two films looked remotely alike.
Bert Gottschalk’s experimental “Framing” combines black-and-white photographs of old building façades, cut up and recombined with snippets of 8mm film, the shape of the sprockets echoing the shapes of the windows; meanwhile, in “The Old, Old, Very Old Man,” Elizabeth Hobbs uses splotchy, watery ink drawings upon white tile to tell the story of 152-year-old Thomas Parr’s fatal meeting with King Charles I.
And there’s more: Juan Pablo Zaramella’s “Lapsus” is a very funny little doodle of a movie that’s sort of like Chuck Jones’ “Duck Amuck” crossed with the monochromatic drawing style of Persepolis; and at the other end of the technological scale, Michael Langan’s “Doxology” uses state-of-the-art computer technology to create some souped-up live-action images that would have made Norman MacLaren’s eyes pop out of his head—especially the brief shot of a man dancing the tango with a car.
Probably the highest-profile film in the collection is Josh Raskin’s “I Met the Walrus,” which was one of the nominees for Best Animated Short at this year’s Oscars. The film has a delightful backstory: in 1969, when producer Jerry Levitan was 14 years old, he sneaked into John Lennon’s Toronto hotel room with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and managed to score a brief interview with the former Beatle before security asked him to leave. Lennon’s earnest, occasionally fuzzy-headed observations about politics, music, and non-violent protests provide the film’s soundtrack, which Raskin visualizes by means of some witty, amazingly fluid ink drawings that recall Yellow Submarine, ’60s op art, and the kind of formal illustrations you normally find in dictionaries and 19th-century newspapers. (Signe Baumane’s hilarious “Teat Beat of Sex” also uses animation to illustrate a pre-existing recording, with much raunchier results.)
I’m not sure what this says about me, but my two favourite shorts in the collection are both told from the point of view of disturbed little boys. “T.O.M.,” a three-minute-long oddity by Welsh filmmakers Tom Brown and Daniel Gray, is the more lighthearted of the two: the hero is a precocious schoolboy who describes with childlike simplicity his increasingly bizarre daily routine. It’s probably the least adventurous visually of the shorts in the collection, but the brightly coloured storybook images and the just-slightly-askew perspectives are perfect for the material.
My other favourite is called “Milk Teeth,” it was directed by Tibor Banoczki, who’s got a very striking visual style that combines photorealistic 3-D backgrounds with characters who resemble two-dimensional paper cutouts, and I think it’s close to a masterpiece. There’s no dialogue, and the plot is as skeletal as the withered ears of corn that provide its backdrop: a young boy follows his older sister into a field, where she has a midnight rendezvous with her boyfriend. But Banoczki is so good at using sound (and he’s made the little boy so creepy-looking) that you almost don’t want to breathe for fear of breaking the eerie mood he’s created. You probably wouldn’t want to show this one to your kids, but that’s okay—not everything has to be Ratatouille.
