The ErlKing (USA, 6min., Ben Zelkowicz, ***1/2)--A sand-animation based on Schubert's Lied of Goethe's terrifying 1782 poem Erlkönig, a forerunner to Yeats' 1889 "The Stolen Child," Zelkowicz's lovely, haunted animation echoes Schubert's driven piano triplets in its tale of a child stolen in a dark wood by the ephemeral Erlking. Completely imagistic (unless one is fluent in German), the picture is a triumph of mood and the kinetic anima of hand-manipulated animations.

Asylum (USA, 20 min., Sandy McLeod, ***)--It's difficult to criticize a documentary as important as Sandy McLeod's look at one woman's struggle for asylum from her home country Ghana's practice of female genital mutilation. That the woman, Baaba Andoh, is imprisoned in a United States "detention" centre for over a year pending approval of her political asylum status only adds fuel to the outrage of the situation, but the picture lags for long minutes--finding itself too infatuated with the minutia of Andoh's journey to the point of pointless dramatic recreations. Asylum remains a powerful, affecting work for its topicality if not necessarily its craft.

Family Tree (USA, 35min., Vicky Jenson, *)--Magic realism finding itself strange bedfellows with a Home for the Holidays family holiday dysfunction opera, Family Tree locates Harland Williams in a "straight" role and Talia Shire as a grasping mother. Ace animator Vicky Jenson branches out (literally) in a live action "short" that is too long by half and diverges midway into a fantasy sequence that finds long-lost brother Derrick (sometimes referred to as "Darren" and played by Dave Jeffrey Clark) encountering a progeny-hungry tree-ogre on a French culinary-school field trip. Derrick/Darren finds himself with the unenviable malady of growing roots (literally/metaphorically, whatever) whenever his feet get wet, that wanderlust at odds with the sickly family unity theme that glows throughout (DP Pieter Vermeer is a distant relation of the artist). The picture is a big-budget, empty version of Ursa Major (a short to which it shares a huge number of structural similarities)--a pic that did it all already with more elegance and precision, and fewer wayward boys with leaves in their hair. Literally.

Pan with Us (USA, 4min., David Russo, ***1/2)--Kinetic and flat brilliant in its way, Pan with Us takes Robert Frost's titular poem and sets it with a mad montage/collage photographic animation technique that dazzles and, best, opens up (like Erlking) the work with the style. Thoughtful and extra-textual, the picture allows Frost's poem new relevancy, applying it to the state of modern cinema: a criticism of and an ode to the soft art.

Little Blue (Australia, 8min., Peter Carstairs, *)--A weak, statically-shot attempt at magical realism and pocket mother/child reunions, Little Blue is trite and mundane. A story of a little boy who fills his ceiling with water and goes for a little underwater swim, the real tale is the "loosening up" of workaholic mum. The characters ill-established (as is the conflict necessitating a mother/child reunion (were they ever divided?)), what has the potential of a children's anxious fable like Bernard Rose's brilliant Paperhouse washes out as something a good deal more banal.

The Security Guard (France, 14min., Frederic Pelle, ***)--Probably best read as a super-sedate version of Mike Leigh's Naked, Pelle's The Security Guard offers a few uncomfortable pings on France's militant pacifism in its tale of a reluctant security guard (Nicolas Abraham) forced into violence. Its end credits ironically (or not so ironically) scored by a Violent Femmes tune, the picture is pointed and almost gentle--a tight little construction that plays on Zen serendipity to nice effect.

Dumping Elaine (UK, 9min., Peter Lydon, *1/2)--As comedies of perception go, Dumping Elaine is exceptionally lightweight. Pretty well summed up by misunderstandings that develop between two different sets of interfering do-gooders who should probably mind their own business, it's roundelay tale of gender relationships and perceptions points to a predictable twist while motoring along on the strength of its brightness.

Family & Friends (Sweden, 12min., Jonas Odell, ****)--Maybe the best animated short appearing at this year's Shortsfest, Odell's Family & Friends is a series of four short vignettes profiling the titular relations of the narrator. In one, a drunken "uncle" takes the narrator-as-a-boy to see blind divers eating bananas underwater; in another, a haunted "uncle" laments the question he asks a dying man... Each section speaks a little to the existential crises that haunt the human condition while animated in an engaging, concise style. Funny and fragile, the piece is a beauty.

I'll Wait for the Next One (France, 5min., Phillippe Orreindy, **)--Mean-spirited and extremely appealing, it seems, to a certain young rich male segment of the audience, Orreindy's I'll Wait for the Next One finds a desperate man (Pascal Casanova) trolling for a companion on the tube only to reveal when he's lured a lonely woman that it was a joke all along. Unpleasant for sentient beings.

Shadow Man (UK, 12min., Amanda Rudman, **1/2)--Feeling a great deal like Luc Besson's Léon, this tight tale of a little girl's flirtation with the criminal element is disturbing, but too tricky. It feels infatuated with its own cleverness with a cliffhanger hinging around the question of whether the tot has been molested or not. The lingering questions, then, are not so much of perception as a sick kind of speculative voyeurism. Beautifully shot, though, and Rudman's execution is professional.

Squash (France, 27min., Lionel Bailiu, ***1/2)--Fairly certain that I've seen this film before somewhere (this actual film), Lionel Bailiu's Squash is a wonderfully shot squash game between two corporate jackals. In its sports-as-male-testing-ground conceit, it recalls John Sayles' basketball sequence from Return of the Secaucus Seven, but Bailiu is already a filmmaker at this stage of the game, and its "locked room" minimalism is used to excellent effect. It's cruel, but it feels accurate, and best its payoffs are earned.

Tim Tom (France, 5min., Roman Sequard and Christel Pougeoise, ****)--Challenging my belief that Family & Friends is this year's best animated short, Sequard and Pougeoise's Tim Tom is Beckett married to Noh, a comic short that honours the best of Chaplin's existential predicament applied to a barren, theoretical landscape. Art is implicated and tied to the human need to create--a brief dance, but a poignant (and hilarious) one.

Live from Shiva's Dance Floor (USA, 21min., Richard Linklater, ***)--A walk through New York with one of the talking heads from Linklater's own Waking Life, Live from Shiva's Dance Floor is a showcase for poet/tour guide/philosopher Speed Levitch's hypothesis about a living metropolis: NYC as a microcosm of the United States. He's not far off: the mental anguish inspired by the levelling of our dream of island sanctuary and financial security is an epoch-defining event. Ranging from the inspired to the reductively silly, the achievement of the film is first in Levitch's grand suggestion of a buffalo-grazing yard at the site of Ground Zero, and Linklater's continued experimentation with the film form.

Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions (UK, 21min., Christopher Sadler and Loyd Price, ***)--Split into seven three-minute segments shown across each 120 minute shorts program, Aardman's new Wallace & Gromit showcases brief inventions that take the Goldbergian route to common household tasks. The best of them probably "The Snoozatron" (that finds long-suffering Gromit in a sheep costume on a spring), they are crowd favourites largely because of the familiarity with the characters and the fulfillment of the standards that Nick Park & Co. have set for themselves. If none of the shorts ever particularly transcends those standards, more's the pity that Aardman's new feature, the eagerly awaited follow-up to Chicken Run, has been delayed indefinitely.

The Trinket Maker (UK, 8min., Paul Daley, ***1/2)--Dulcet and beautiful, Paul Daley's computer-rendered animation The Trinket Maker is a wordless romance between a hot-air balloon-bound trinket maker and his ladylove, a woman growing tulips in the middle of a verdant countryside. The story told through the gifts they give one another and concluding with a shot of harmony that's poetic and heartbreaking, in its way, Daley's film is a visual treat and an emotional treasure.

porn.com (Germany, 28min., Bob Rafelson, ZERO)--Something of a coup for the Aspen Shortsfest is legendary director Bob Rafelson's new short porn.com; banned in Europe, it made its world premiere this weekend. The great pity of it is that with Aspen resident Rafelson in attendance, I counted over thirty walkouts and, worse, wished to join them. Casting himself as Matty Bonkers, legendary American director in Berlin for a career retrospective, Rafelson indulges in self-mockery at its nadir. The picture, in which Bonkers is offered a job directing a Hitler-themed porno flick, sees itself as a latter day The Producers (complete with a "jap" caricature financier some years after Japan's economic woes) married to the martyr pose of All That Jazz (note the Benny Hill chase and Matty's morning ritual). What emerges is an embarrassing farce punctuated by a "politically sensitive" sequence wherein the Hitler porn king gets a blowjob as he watches footage of The Blitz and the fall of Paris and screams about "fucking Britain" when he's done fucking the actresses. Only disquieting in the degree to which Rafelson has fallen from the shining genius of Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, porn.com is painful to watch: an apologia for reduced and degraded production with a finger pointed at the Hollywood machinery when it should be pointing square at its own director.

back to coverage index for the 12th Annual Aspen Shortsfest