Analysis - Keith Reynolds can't make it tonight (OUAN402)

I came across this film by Felix Massie after we watched another of his animations, "In The Air Is Christopher Gray". In class. It was a real gem with a cracking story,  comfortably condensed into a few minutes of rich and smooth animation with the assistance of some really good narration with great dark comedy and it made me want to find out more about this animator.

In The Air Is Christopher Gray (2013). An easy way to have characters talking without going to the hassle of animating is to not give them faces.

Keith Reynolds can't make it tonight (2007)

Since this came out six years prior to the other film, I prefer the art style of In The Air Is Christopher Gray. It's more polished and unique, whereas the stick figures in this animation seem a little more generic, like from a flash animation.

Having said that, this animation does do a lot of stuff differently, which I really enjoyed. The way it's shot is awesome, showing nothing but the two-dimensional cross section of an office building as the characters traverse up and down in the lift.

There are no other camera angles to add drama or intensity and I felt very detached from the action. This ties in well with the narrator who seems to not have much emotional investment in the characters, but simply tells the story in a bit of a monotone voice. There is nothing dramatic about it. This meshes really well with the actual, very dramatic content of the film which includes murder, lost love and the destruction of a man's life. The contrast means that the animation treads a fine line between being humorous and being unsettling, like a child's party magician with terrible dental hygiene.

Since the characters have no face and voice, and because it's shot and narrated in a very un-dramatic way, I wasn't emotionally invested in the onscreen struggles. It was really funny instead, appealing to my primal sense of humour in someone else's suffering.

What I like about this film and the main lesson I think I can take from it is that it tells the story in a very unconventional way which was refreshing to see. Rather than having one central narrative and traditional character archetypes like protagonists and antagonists, the narrator tells the broad story of each person in the office and what they are doing at exactly the same time, a method known as "panoptic" storytelling. The narrator is objective and relaxed about everything, and some of the best humour came from the occasional sly, witty comment that the narrator made over the disaster happening on screen. There are no heroes or villains in this piece, no grandeur, just a sense of "well, that's life" about the whole story.

It's really excellent.