Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
New Hertzfeldt... must see new Hertzfeldt... I am... a banana...
Hi Harry and fellow movie fans! The weather in Park City has been beautiful this week, wish you were here ;) Here's our first review from the ground for you.
The wife and I just got in from the SUNDANCE ANIMATION PROGRAM and we only have one thing to say: Don Hertzfeldt RULES! THE MEANING OF LIFE blew all the other stuff off the screen and is so far the best thing we've seen at the Festival.
I had a giant geek grin across my face throughout these 12 blissful minutes and the wife even got a little misty during the film's beautiful climax. It's just a pure shot of joy in the arm. Basically, it's about life and death on earth over the course of a couple billion years (my guess), but that's really only scratching the surface. Imagine a FANTASIA segment as directed by Hertzfeldt and you might get a better idea.
MEANING's a big departure from what fans might expect from a new Hertzfeldt cartoon (the humor's very under the surface this time, if at all), but he's somehow managed to top his last one, REJECTED, in sheer spectacle and technical magic. Personally I think it's his best one yet. Hertzfeldt explained a little in the Q&A about how he created the film but I still can't figure out how he pulled off these visuals without using a computer. The whole thing was shot in-camera, even the special effects which he said are all multiple exposures and hand-crafted stuff, circa 1950 Disney technology. Geek bliss!!
Really a masterpiece. Enough said.
As for the other shorts, a mixed bag. Overall they were okay but on the whole forgettable. I don't think this was the fault of the filmmakers but on the part of Sundance programming. All of these other shorts were slow and somber and after seeing 5 of them in a row they begun to blend together. Could have used a lot more comedy. But these were some of the others that I remember:
NINE: A nifty CGI piece about a little character battling a monster. I think I read here that the animator also worked on RETURN OF THE KING. This was an OK short but really nothing you haven't seen before.
RYAN: What might have been a cool bio about washed-up junkie animator Ryan Larkin was ruined by the director's insistience of forcing himself into the story. The whole thing got muddy and narcissistic... we thought it was lame. If you have a subject for a documentary this fascinating, don't make the movie about yourself instead. Disappointing.
BIRTHDAY: Amusing stop motion about the relationship between a cow and a man who wants to kill it. A bit over long but cute and different.
FALLEN ART: This was our 2nd favorite to THE MEANING OF LIFE. Nice, short and fucked up. I don't know if the audience was too afraid to laugh but I enjoyed it. Don't want to ruin it for you, just try to catch this one too if you can.
To sum up, not a bad program, Hertzfeldt is worth two times the price of admission. Somebody needs to get this guy a feature film deal before he continues to slowly turn into the Howard Hughes of animation.
If you decide to run this, please call me HORATIO : ) we'll have more for you soon!
Thanks, man. Can’t wait to see what else you send.
"Moriarty" out.
