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By: Martyn Pedler
Date: 20th Jul 07
Format: Festival
Mood: Whimsical
What:It’s time to put an end to tabloid magazines. Supermarket checkout-stands could instead be filled with sardonic literary journals and a shining utopia couldn’t be far behind, right? The first step in the revolution is replacing all actors with animation. The 6th Melbourne International Animation Festivalfeatures more than 350 different films from animators around the world:painstakingly poetic ‘hand painted under camera’ films,computer-generated battle sequences, and everything in between.
Highlights include: monkeys fighting robots in Burning Safari; a scientific exploration of cartoon physics on a real-world mouse in Carlitopolis; and Weiss,a nightmarish depiction of a lone figure in a world of white,navigating through a maze using only his shadow. Inevitably, some try to use pretty visuals to distract from a weak concept and worse script. Joanna Quinn’s Dreams & Desires: Family Ties plays out like a reheated sitcom and, even at less than ten minutes, long overstays its welcome.
There's even a long-overdue retrospective for Fred Crippen – whose career spanned Sesame Street to Playboy, but who is best known as the creator of Generation X’s favourite ironic patriot and infamous pill-popper Roger Ramjet.