“A Strange and Powerful Selection of Well-Curated Shorts”
The Manipulate festival’s horror shorts screening was initially intended as a retrospective. As the host of the event explains, upon seeing the quality and diversity of the current animated horror landscape, the plan for the screening was changed to highlight some of the best artists currently working in the medium. The eight shorts come from all over the globe and encompass a wide variety of ideas and animation styles. Though not all perfect, the sheer work and effort put into each of these short films makes the whole event difficult not to admire.
The screening opens, rather weakly, with Buzzkill. Made by US animator Peter Ahern, Buzzkill is the most traditional of the shorts in terms of style and plot. A basic (if somewhat nonsensical) story is carried by cute, cartoony animation, and leaves with a fun but shallow impression.
The interest picks up with the next film Larval by Alice Bloomfield, the only UK animator featured. Larval has a simple story and simple message that is rendered in a beautifully trippy animation style. With no dialogue Bloomfield is able to capture complex feelings and tell a sad, striking story through powerful symbolic imagery, truly showing just how much can be done with the medium.
Larval is followed by the small and charming Algo en el Jardin, a Chilean movie by Marcos Sanchez. This film is about as simple as it gets, with no dialogue and not much of a story, Algo en el Jardin is a short and unsettling work that does what it has to and gets out quickly.
The best of the screening also happens to be the longest. From French animators Stéphanie Lansaque and François Leroy, Sisowath Quay is a haunting and beautiful work. The film is filled with interesting horror concepts and wonderfully evocative imagery. It reaches a level of depth with its allegory that feels on par with what is usually only achieved by feature-length films. This packed short is one of the few films at the event that truly got under my skin and stuck with me long after the credits had rolled.
From one great height to another, Sisowath Quay is followed by Les Bêtes, the second US entry, this one by Michael Granberry. With a simple, Fantasia-esque story, Les Bêtes really shines with its stellar stop motion animation. The titular beasts are all wholly distinct and wonderfully inventive in both look and craft. Though there are plenty of harrowing moments the final image is delightfully hopeful and left me with a smile on my face.
Regenerative Being, by Ukrainian animator Stas Santimov is similarly stand-out, not for its animation but its music. Regenerative Being is the music video for the Eluvium song of the same title, and uses its uncomfortable and frightening imagery to contrast with the slow melancholy of the song. This contrast lends itself to some truly striking moments and transforms the animation and the song to much more than the sum of their parts.
Next up was Italian animator Matteo Burani’s Playing God. Another stop motion work, Playing God is certainly the most technically impressive film on this list. With a tragic and darkly amusing story rendered impressively with clay figures and human actors, Playing God is the kind of film that, more than anything, left me pleasingly baffled as to how exactly it was even constructed.
Closing out the screening was the Taiwanese Praying Mantis, by animator Joe Hsieh. The story of Praying Mantis is well-rounded and interesting, managing to fit a well-structured flashback sequence and twist into only seven minutes. The animation of the titular praying mantis feels out of place however, and brings down the overall quality of the film.
All in all, Manipulate has put on an excellent selection of horror shorts. The diversity of creators and ideas present among these films is very refreshing and admirable and really highlights just what can be done in an animated horror short.
This screening was a one-time event shown at the Edinburgh Filmhouse on the 6th of February as part of the Manipulate festival which is running in venues across Scotland from the 4th to the 10th of February.
[…] two very enthusiastic reviews of ‘Sisowath Quay’ online. One came from the website ‘A Young(ish) Perspective‘ and was written by Finn Baldwin. Here’s an excerpt: « It reaches a level of depth […]