My second week of the festival was all about movies I could see with Ada.
Animation for Kids 8+
Around an hour of kid-oriented short films; a mixed bag, but well within a 9 year old’s attention span (whereas the collection for 4 year olds over-taxed Rosa a bit).
Spring Jam
A neat wee New Zealand animation; two stags with a variety of native birds perched on their heads, singing a chorus. A third wants to join in but instead of the songbirds the first two posses, he has only a less than tuneful kiwi; a series of mishaps ensure, leading him to discover (in a hunter’s caravan!) the answer to his problem: a record player. The animation style is delightful, plaing with the the conventions of 2D and 3D. The use of music works perfectly, and it’s good fun.
Anatole’s Little Saucepan
A French short about a boy who has a saucepan tethered to his leg; the saucepan clanks and clangs, and sometimes gets hooked up in holes; other kids sometimes tease him, and every now and then he gets frustrated and loses his temper. To me it read as a clear analogy for autism (or the like, I guess). The story ends happily enough, though, with him meeting an adult who also has a saucepan and can help him learn to live with his.
Lovely animation and a charming story.
An Object at Rest
I’m sure I’ve seen this short before; told from the point of view of a mountain which, over the years, is ground down and found various uses in various places. Good fun.
Two Friends
A tadpole and a caterpillar are friends; when each begines their metamorphasis into adulthood; the friendship does not survive the transformation. Well done.
Some Thing
A group of mountains are proud of their contents: lava, gold, and such. A fourth mountain is mocked for its apparently uninteresting items, which turn out to be the seeds of a forest.
About a Mother
An arc of motherhood, it’s a well-made story of a mother raising her three sons, but rubbed me a bit the wrong way - mostly for being set against a vaguely sub-Saharan African backdrop while being a European movie.
My Grandfather Was a Cherry Tree
The pick of the shorts for me; the bittersweet and ultimately happy story following the arc of a little boy with his grandparents and parents as he plays in their garden; when his grandmother dies, his grandfather imagines her spirit becoming part of the cherry tree on their small farm.
The family move in with the grandfather, until their idyllic life is threatened by local officials planning a road through the farm; the cherry tree will need to be ripped out. Happily, the boy staves off this threat.
Pawo
I don’t remember this at all.
Slaves of the Rave
Fun intercuts of different music and audiences becoming steadily more muddled over time, as the audiences break through the walls of the animation to move from show to show. Very stereotyped, but good for a giggle.
Three Little Ninjas Delivery Service
A princess amuses herself by cheering her dragon buddy on as it incinerates hapless would-be rescuers, until a particularly annoying chinless wonder manages to kill the dragon. Desperate to avoid his Pepe le Pew-like attentions, she calls the Three Little Ninjas delivery service to obtain a replacement dragon. The ninjas use their snot, farts, and sundery other grossness to time travel to a point where they can obtain such a thing and the story unfolds from there…
I found it pretty tedious, but Ms 9 thought it was the height of wit, so there you are. Whecked the target audience in the funny bone nice and hard.
La Tortue rouge / The Red Turtle
So one of the things I tend to do with films is try not to find out too much about them befoer I go in; I generally enjoy them better that way. When it comes to films I plan on taking the kids to, though, there’s a fundamental tension, because I want to know enough to know whether it’s going to be age appropriate (amongst other things); sometimes I get this balance wrong, as with last year’s disasterous Princess Kaguya. It’s not that the film was disasterous per se. It’s a brilliant piece of animated film-making. But it is a gut-wrenching heartbreaker from the same part of Ghibli that gave the world Grave of the Fireflies, so it saw Ada exit in hysterics (and I felt shattered).
The Red Turtle is co-produced under the Ghibli banner but is a nominally European film - not that it matters, since it’s entirely wordless - and, despite my bad luck last year, this took me by surprise since I’d seen nothing more than the trailer and a brief description from the NZIFF web site.
The art is gorgeous, and the story is affecting; a man, shipwrecked on an island, lives out his life there, prevented from escaping by a mysterious force that destroys the rafts he builds over the years. Over time he discovers what it is that prevents him from leaving. The remainder of the film was, for Ada and I, very affecting as it followed the course of his days, through to a happy death at an old age; a bitterweet ending for the audience. I really enjoyed this, but it left me off-kilter, being neither what I expected going into it, nor what I expected at many points along much of the route of the film.
A delight, overall, but not always a comfortable one.