Manchester Animation Festival DAY THREE (Chris Shepherd's films) (OUAN402)

I'm devoting this whole section to Chris Shepherd's retrospective because it was so good! I didn't know much of Chris Shepherd's work, except for the thing he did with David Shrigley "Who I am and What I Want", but his films blew me away. They had such great range, dealing with harsh topics without using tired tropes but also having a darkly funny sense of humour and occasionally really clever, light humour. Or maybe the light humour had dark undertones and I didn't understand them. What I admire most about this filmmaker is the massive diversity of his content. Each of his movies is really fresh and interesting.

"The Broken Jaw" (1997)

This was one of my favourites. I liked the way that it exaggerated the old characters who attend the dingy titular pub, staggering about on their zimmer frames with swirling eyeballs and communicating in garbled grunts. I found it hilarious from start to finish. I liked the way the lighting was imposed over the photographed backgrounds. The whole aesthetic was brill. It made me consider my own practice because I always tend to lean towards a certain style that I think looks the funniest, so I rarely leave my comfort zone. Seeing great comedic value of these characters, though, made we want to experiment more with funny character design in order to become a well rounded cartoonist.

The Ringer:

A darkly comedic and deeply touching short that did something really different with the "absent dad" theme and was a great example of how animation and live action can intertwine. I loved the way that this film snapped back and forth between an animated crime drama and the live action drama, both of which were related to each other very cleverly and were well balanced against each other to help the movie keep a brisk pace. It's hard to work out what it is that I like about Chris Shepherd's films because it's hard to categorise them. I enjoy them because they tend to spurn the traditional customs of movie making with use of animation and unusual editing effects to stay snappy and exciting yet remain grounded with their characters and comedy, so it's accessible to everybody and not just the art scholars. I enjoyed the animation itself in this film for its detail and respected it's unique aesthetic.

Safari:

For the sake of looking at a wide variety of things, I also want to address this totally off the wall animation that Shepherd made in 1989 with nothing but SCRAPS and plucky resilience. It's totally abstract and really clever and creative and has a whole bunch pf absurdist humour packed into it. The stop motion is reminiscent of someone's GCSE animation project or something like that, but given the bizarre subject matter it's actually rather fitting, since the characters are as alien looking and moving as the atmosphere of the whole film. I've mentioned this before, but I'm really amped to get into stop motion because for me it is the most real means of animated storytelling, and hand crafted figurines often have more definition to them. Overall, this film was short and sweet and charming and, similarly to the rest of the films in this retrospective, unlike anything I had seen before.