Remembering how a Life is Made – and Forgotten

Memorable Shorts Make a Lasting Impression at AAIFF

Like an open journal with the hearts of the filmmakers on display, these animated shorts often explore the creator’s history and their ongoing creation of an identity. At times moving, transformative, and wholly imaginative, we’re given a slap of comedy and a healthy dose of love for the craft in a 2D space.

The animation styles slide from cut-out to hand-drawn to 3D, but each one offers a glimpse into the history of its creators as burgeoning artists, in a post-war nostalgia, as children who have made their way to adulthood. Crafted with care and told with a gentle reminiscence of times gone by, these shorts remind us all to take a moment and, simply, breathe.

THE OLD YOUNG CROW

This felt like a dream told with the timbre of a loved one. The animation style is fresh and unique, merging 2D and 3D animation in a fantastical and abbreviated way that shapes the story in a slightly off-putting, yet still memorable, way. Simple strokes bring characters to life and illustrate a story better than thousands of lines running down a manuscript.

A young Iranian boy meets an old Japanese woman at a graveyard in Tokyo, only to realize that what he’s seeing and hearing may not be real when he tries to visit her again to find…nothing. Despite this element of confusion, the charm and love we feel from their interaction is very real.

The music and cinematography blend together to elevate an already tight story to keep its audience wondering what happens next. We broach the topic of death, but we do it so mythically, magically, eloquently so in a handful of hand drawn images that you can’t help but question if death is as scary as it seems.

HANDWRITTEN

Any expectations you have for Jaime Sunwoo’s “Handwritten” are met, exceeded, and then subverted – all within under nine minutes. The stop-motion cutout animation begins with paper. Pages upon pages of the stuff layered with Sunwoo’s handwriting from long ago to the script she uses now, all as a metaphor for change and the words we share to express ourselves. She begins with her history and then the history of writing and then spirals in neatly contained chaos to compare the writing of murderers and would-be scientists and how writing is such an essential form of expression and identity.

It feels like a meandering conversation, a moment where a friend rambles on and on about a topic they find fascinating and you can’t help but listen to them fondly as they connect miscellaneous lines of meaning. Hidden in the animation is the form of a well-thought out video essay with the pros and cons of handwriting oscillating around each other in a theatrical dance, but the short film doesn’t inspire feelings of frustration or anger or even inspiration or love; it simply asks for introspection and a moment to feel yourself.

THE ABSENCE OF MEMORY

Brian Yulo Ng gathers the stories of his military peers after their mandatory service in Singapore and each one carries the weight of things best left forgotten and a mishmash of emotions as varied as the voices narrating this short. Some are thankful for the discipline and the time they spent in service to their country. Some felt bitter contempt at losing agency and being commanded into submission. 

The military men delve into their unique experiences, and while all of them lack a sense of nostalgia, they all seem to speak with a sort of wistfulness of a time when they were younger and less experienced, albeit in a uniform they oft did not want to don.

Ng strings these stories together with an array of flashing numbers, live footage, 2D, and layered animations with a robust score and SFX to tie each man’s disparate experiences into a whole. Their military time was a unifying factor, but that is the only thing similar about these men who experienced radically different and life-changing moments during their service.

THE COCOON

What a metaphor for life and creation and being an artist! We watch a man with no face but every emotion desperately try to clean up the mess he accidentally creates in a room he cannot escape. After several attempts to clean up after every step he takes, the man decides … to not.

He instead creates a breath-taking piece of art and realizes that he can bring life to his work that he previously did not have. He paints every corner of the room he is in, and it flutters to life before our eyes.

The man himself is a simple drawing, animated across the screen with rough lines and thoughtful poses. He dances across the screen with the elegance of an artist just coming into their art and it evokes feelings of hope and optimism and freedom. The art style is simple, but it is so easy to be drawn into the story and the plight of our protagonist and realize that without a face, he embodies the insecurities and fears of every artist afraid to make that first stroke on a canvas.

BREATHE

We follow a young boy as he tries to meditate and relax into his breaths. Though easily distracted, he manages to enter a state of freedom and relaxation as his mind and spirit explores the area outside the temple.

The colors are vibrant and the animation is cute, the fun and freeness of the protagonist reflected in the character designs and his excited movements. Even with no dialogue, the story progresses smoothly with the calming, inspirational music alongside the many varied and well-placed bits of sound design. There is a happiness and appreciation for the world in general and we are allowed the briefest of glimpses into that in this five minute short.

We are left with a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh that says “At any moment, you have a choice that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it” as a reminder of how life is made up of seconds, minutes, hours in a day. There are many of them, but it’s these moments that make up a life and it’s a life we get to choose to live.

MY MOTHER’S TONGUE (LA LANGUE DE MA MÈRE)

A beautiful soundscape sewn together with French narration and a long, thought-provoking stream of consciousness. We listen to Jean-Batptiste Phou’s low and lilting voice murmur about his family, about his language learning journey to learn Khmer, about his relationship with his parents. His words, paired with the extensive sound design and music make this a complete story if you closed your eyes and only listened to it.

The animation consists of illustrations being drawn on and sped up and beyond the initial intrigue, did not translate the story as well as it could have or with the elevation it needed. However, the animation is expressed neatly and the illustrations drawn over archival photos truly makes the protagonist feel like an outcast, literally photoshopped into a culture and a history he found no connection to.

FORGET ME — A GOODBYE LETTER (永訣書)

This short is bookended by a somewhat crumbling relationship between a mother and her son, with the bulk of Ryan Shih’s story coming in the form of chaotic and experimental animation in the middle. The narration is long and sad, and we don’t receive context until the end, when we realize: this is the last letter of a father to a daughter. He apologizes for his mistakes and failings and hopes she can, not forgive, but forget him, for not being there and for seemingly doing everything wrong.

The narration is hard to hear and overshadowed by the music. The animated scenes have vague and tenuous lines to the words being said and the relationships between each character are almost nonexistent.

The weaknesses Shih faces in narrative pacing and flow does not diminish the remarkable testament to the raw emotions and slow current of sadness he portrays in expressing the injustice Taiwanese rebels face from their very own government.