Friday, July 16, 2010

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #47: Cartoon Noir (1999)

Feel like some short film? Animated short film perhaps? Something that isn't terribly funny? Consider Cartoon Noir.

Noir presents you with six short films plucked from the murky skulls of an array of animators, hailing from such cultural planetary zones as Portugal, Poland, the USA, The UK, and the Czech Republic. Animation styles vary from film to film, moving, for example, from chiaroscuro to stop-motion to detailed and colourful paintwork, each mode affecting tone and subject matter like wet black birds on a wire - unsettling and proportionate and balanced and with voltage. In regards to tone or atmosphere or whatever you’d like to call it, the films should give you a taste of the romantic, the morose, the bizarre, the eerie, the bleak, and even, finally, the life-affirming. Each tale contains a dark sensibility, whether it be a brooding Dostoevsky-inspired murder story or an endearing fable about a cat caught in the night and in love. Forgotten mannequins in a warehouse or (my personal favourite) a suicide witnessed by a horrified and concerned Mickey Mouse parody. Even a poem about a baked monkey. Everybody loves monkeys.

So: Highly recommended.

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