17/10/2022 - In our first story from Animest, Vlad Marina picks out two laugh-out-loud films from the Short Competition section

The opening screening of Animest’s Shorts Competition has expectedly come with a variety of stories, themes and aesthetics. There were films about alienation and the loss of love (Felix Reinecker’s Migrating Birds, Shi-Rou Huang’s Girl in the Water), political metaphors (Phoebe Wong’s Fisheyes, Elizabeth Hobbs’ The Debutante), animated documentaries (Tsunami Girl by Leo Compasso, Carlos Balseironsa, Antonio Balseiro and Emiliano Rodriguez Nuesch), pastoral fables (Tomar Ollech’s Little Boy), experimental poems (Äggie Pak Yee Lee’s Beauty & the Beasts, Zhiheng Wang’s Patient’s Mind), utopias (Pink Noise by Ulysse Lefort, Martin Wiklung and Arthur Lemaître) and dystopias (Marta Pajek’s Impossible Figures and Other Stories I). However, only two shorts endeavoured – and managed – to make the audience laugh out loud. They did so in different ways, without necessarily being light-hearted.

The first of them is Katarzyna Mechanic’s Headprickles, which might be described as a series of absurd sketches depicting the events of an (extra)ordinary life, events which are then twisted towards unlikely – and quite amusing – outcomes. An emerging Polish director and animator, Miechowicz has already shown an affinity for Kafkaesque set-ups in her previous short Crumbs of Life (2020), similarly mixing the quotidian and the surreal to critical acclaim. With Headprickles, one can tell that her formula has properly matured.

In terms of animation style, the film favours strong colours, decors with few details, unusual angles, blunt 2D movements and often deformed shapes. Not all of this is clear from the get-go: the opening landscape is designed rather naively, with pinkish hills, roughly sketched trees, and a childishly drawn sun. As soon as the ethereal music stops, however, we zoom out and the landscape disquietingly reveals itself to be the eyes of a tired nun, with the sun acting as her eyeball. More such vignettes follow: a martial arts guru sitting in his narcissistic studio, surrounded by portraits of himself, is interrupted in his contemplation by one of the pictures falling; a woman in a grocery store spends several seconds deciding whether to buy a single banana; a surrealistically oversized businessman discovers living (and singing!) kernels inside the fruit he is eating, only to throw them away, unimpressed. And, perhaps most strikingly and absurdly of all, a centaur inserts coins into an empty claw machine and then goes to the effort of picking up a non-existent item.

There is a fundamental futility to these characters and their actions. Theirs is a deterministic, meaningless world, with passive actors obeying predetermined and arbitrary laws. Why, then, do we find it funny? Perhaps it is because everybody seems so accepting of their fate that they reach an almost Zen-level tranquillity. To not mind the absurd is, in itself, absurd, and thus ultimately liberating. Katarzyna Miechowicz is certainly taking Camus' advice seriously and imagining Sisyphus laughing.

By comparison, Sierra, the latest short by established Estonian animation filmmaker Sander Joon has quite a different approach to humour and, for that matter, life. Having already won multiple awards by the time of its Animest screening, the film plays out as a warm albeit ironic parable about parents’ desires to have their children follow in their footsteps.

Here, we have a father – inspired by Joon’s own – with a lifelong passion for racing cars. We see him working in the garage, sporting a strict moustache, a permanent cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a blue working suit, quietly dreaming of making a convert out of his disinterested son. To accomplish this, he one day decides to take him to a proper race, but, of course, things do not go as planned.

Using this simple but efficient storyline as its backbone, Sierra manages to establish both a dynamic pace that keeps us invested in the course of events, and a carefully controlled nostalgic vibe that works as a potential spark for our personal and cultural associations, thus facilitating our emotional involvement. The colours are plain and vivid, the character and object design are always playful (oversized, round faces, racing cars with five pedals and six headlights), and the overall environment is lively and accomplished enough to feel like a world of its own.

The race itself is quite a spectacular one. As in old cartoons, the laws of physics are exuberantly violated, with photographers rolling on the track and keeping pace with the cars, a team of frogs managing to set a tire in motion, and two drivers who are able to pull off a last-second victory while their car and bodies are on fire. Factoring in the slick editing and the groovy soundtrack, the end result is a rather intense and moving ride, whose bittersweet outcome shows that even the tricky topic of parental mistakes and their potentially traumatic effects can be tackled with candour.

If Headprickles’ laughter is existential and sarcastic and Sierra’s is, on the contrary, frisky and compassionate, both are undoubtedly memorable, making the films strong candidates for an award in their section.