Have Shorts Will Travel

Coming-of-age tale ‘Belly' is one of eight films included in the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Animated Shorts On Tour

Coming-of-age tale ‘Belly’ is one of eight films included in the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Animated Shorts On Tour

In the early days of motion pictures through the late 1800s and early 1900s, films were short — the first ones being under a minute long. But throughout the years, short films have largely faded from mainstream viewing, pushed into obscurity — a trend that Sundance Film Festival short film programmer Mike Plante says could be changing.

“There is a big industry taking shape for shorts,” Plante says. “Shorts could play hundreds of theaters through film festivals and then have a whole new life online after that.”

In recent years, Sundance Institute has been expanding viewing opportunities for the shorts that air at its festival — launching Shorts on Tour in 2012. This year, Sundance produced the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Animated Shorts on Tour — which screens locally from Dec. 26 to Jan. 2 at Honolulu Museum of Art’s Doris Duke Theatre.

The short film tour selection was curated from films that screened at this year’s festival, as well as a few favorites from recent years.

“We wanted to showcase not just a variety of amazing styles, but great storytelling and characters that we love to support at the festival each year,” Plante explains. “I hope the program gives the audience all kinds of emotions, happy and sad, so they leave laughing, but also thinking.”

Doris Duke Theatre film curator Abigail Algar says that one of the best parts of the collection is its variety. The eight films include claymation, pencil drawings, puppetry and painting.

“Some of these films you can’t even see online,” Algar says, “so it is a rare opportunity.

“There are so many great animated shorts that come out of Sundance,” she adds.

For instance, the now-wildly popular South Park made its first appearance at Sundance as a short film called The Spirit of Christmas in 1997.

“So, you never know — you could be seeing the next South Park,” Algar says.

Here’s the lineup:

BELLY

This bittersweet seven-minute film tells the story of a young boy, Oscar, who just wants to hang out with his older brother, Alex. Written and directed by animator and illustrator Julia Pott — who was among Filmmaker Magazine‘s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2012 — Belly is a sentimental, abstract think piece on growing up, and the things we leave behind when we do.

This is one film that Algar describes as being “out-ofthe-box.”

Belly is an interesting one — just the way (Pott) has created the characters and the narrative,” Algar says. “It almost seems to be a little bit more like video art and presented in that kind of tradition.”

IT’S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY This is the third and final installment about Bill, who was first introduced in writer/ director Don Hertzfeldt’s Everything Will be OK. The series follows Bill through his day-today life, revealing he is struggling with memory loss as the result of an unknown ailment. This film picks up with Bill having gotten worse — and his condition may be fatal. Told by a deadpan narrator and illustrated with stick figures juxtaposed with snippets of the real world and colorful graphics, It’s Such A Beautiful Day is at once a somber, existential death rattle and an uplifting celebration of life.

Hertzfeldt is a widely renowned animator whose work — which also includes The Meaning of Life and Rejected — has received more than 200 awards.

MARILYN MYLLER

This meta reflection on art is a delicately designed clay animation about a clay animator struggling to create her clay art. Written and directed by award-winning animator Mikey Please, who currently is working on his first feature-length film, Marilyn Myller opens with impressive visuals — while the second half questions what that even really means, with tongue placed firmly in cheek.

“This film kicks off the program,” Algar says, “and it’s kind of a comment on the artistic process and what it takes.”

THE OBVIOUS CHILD

An abusive, chain-smoking little girl eerily parading around in different masks teams up with an innocent rabbit to get her dead parents into heaven. But the plan doesn’t seem to be working, and she spends most of these 21 minutes kicking around their mutilated limbs.

Alternately praised as an experimental triumph and denigrated as disturbing, writer/director Stephen Irwin’s film certainly is one of the more unusual selections included in the tour.

OH WILLY…

This film centers around Willy, who visits his ailing mother at her home in a nudist colony, where he grew up. Initially uneasy, Willy gets lost and is forced to fend for himself in the wilderness.

Created by animation team Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef, Oh Willy… showcases lifelike wool puppetry in stop-motion.

SUBCONSCIOUS PASSWORD

You know that awful feeling when you run into someone you know — but can’t remember their name? Chris Landreth takes that concept and runs with it, exploring what goes on in your mind during those moments, taking viewers through a game show the subconscious has to play to get the right answer.

VOICE ON THE LINE

Utilizing archival footage, Kelly Sears strings together a story about Cold War paranoia — and a secret government project to spy on us through telephone operators. What they find — and the prurient result the project ultimately lends — isn’t exactly what they were looking for.

Its underlying questions about where privacy ends and national interests begin keep it relevant — as does its exploration into the ways we connect with each other — but even though it clocks in at just seven minutes, it feels a bit repetitive.

YEARBOOK

An everyman is hired to compile an account of all the important people throughout history before the world is blown up in 17 years. The film follows his process as he decides whom to include and whom to delete. It teeters on existential — and raises some sad-but-funny questions about what our work ultimately means — but opts instead to be a heartfelt testament to human existence.

While Algar says that it’s hard to choose a favorite film from the tour, this is one that really stuck with her.

“It’s very sweet,” she says. “It has a nice story in it, a nice message. It’s very beautiful.”

Critics, it seems, agree. Yearbook won Sundance’s Short Film Grand Jury Prize this year. And filmmaker Bernado Britto recently was included in Filmmaker Magazine‘s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

This is just the start of a partnership with Sundance Institute for Doris Duke Theatre. In March, the museum will host a two-day ShortLabs program, featuring panel discussions and workshops led by Sundance programmers and filmmakers.

In a lot of ways, short films are perhaps more ambitious than their feature-length counterparts. Filmmakers have a limited amount of time to tell a story, evoke a mood, relay a message. While Animated Shorts on Tour, as Algar says, has a lot of variety, the collection feels fluid — in mood at least. Collectively, these pieces evoke a pressing feeling — much like short films as a format — that everything is fleeting.

Tickets for 2014 Sundance Film Festival Animated Shorts on Tour cost $10 for general admission and $8 for museum members. For more information and a full schedule of times, honolulumuseum.org.