Review
PUPPETS ON SCREEN: CURRENTLY WIRED
International Festival of Animated Objects
Saturday, January 22
EMMedia
Now in its second year, the Calgary International Festival of Animated Objects continues to maintain a focus on the role of puppets (hand-controlled, stop-motion and otherwise) in film with a program of homegrown Canadian films compiled by Brenda Whiteman and Peter Stinson, puppeteer filmmakers who comprise Calgary’s Red Smarteez.
Running the gamut from scary Jan Svenkmeyer-style absurdity (Graeme Patterson’s surreal Don’t Ride Shopping Carts) to rough-hewn video puppet shows (Julia Thiessen and Sean Talarico’s hilarious homemade sci-fi epic Wack Shack), there’s more than ample proof that the world of puppet films doesn’t begin and end with the Muppets and an annual re-watch of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
· Completed in collaboration with the Quickdraw Animation Society, local firefighter Rouge Ashmead’s pro-shibby Pothole Trilogy has somehow found cult status through the hands of actor Woody Harrelson, who distributes copies to his fellow pothead friends in Los Angeles.
· A head-trip of its own, Tim Barnard’s The Grey Area fills the screen with multi-layered animated bits of fabric and rough-cut paper in sync with its jazz score.
· Sharon Jinkerson’s Raven Returns creates a portrait of Native mask-carver Victor Reece (masks remaining a special focus for the festival as a whole).
· Saskatchewan aboriginal filmmaker Dennis Jackson’s Journey Through Fear re-writes a hunting fable, giving it a new anti-American deus ex machina twist.
· Elizabeth Belliveau’s A Hungry Moose and A Goodness are short but sweet abstracts more endearing than a postcard – not to mention beautiful.
· Amazing on all levels, Jesse Rosensweet’s debut Stone of Folly borrows a page from Henry Selick (director of The Nightmare Before Christmas) with a darkly funny visit through a dark and twisted hospital that garnered well-deserved plaudits from the Cannes Film Festival.
· As a local bonus, screening programmers Red Smarteez (in collaboration with Penny A. P. Anderson) will be presenting a preview performance of the first episode in their upcoming six-part series The Kay Stories. Based on the life of Whiteman’s late sister, Kay Noreen Whiteman, even in rough form the footage gives a glimpse at what will soon undoubtedly rest as the duo’s finest work. Both autobiographically heavy and charmingly funny, Stinson and Whiteman’s live rendition set to film is an intriguing early look at a potentially grand work in progress.
· Finally, the group’s special presentation of their favourite moments from the career of Gerry Anderson (the man behind Fireball XL5, Stingray and Thunderbirds) is one worth staying up for. Over the course of 12 series, Anderson defined television puppetry.
For those hoping to make their own leap into the realm of puppet films, Stinson suggests the most important lesson from the oeuvre of Anderson: "Marionettes never walk right. Don’t show them walking – do science fiction and they can just float around." |
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