Leeds International Film Festival: Highlights from World Animation Competition 3
Catgot
Animation is too often pinned down as a genre in and of itself. The widely held notion of animation as something only for children and only telling a certain kind of story has long overshadowed the myriad of animated works that don’t even come close to sitting comfortably in that description. Leeds International Film Festival’s short films programme World Animation Competition 3 is proof of this diversity within the mode of animation, directly challenging stereotypes about this method of filmmaking and showcasing films that push animation forward in innovative, exciting ways.
Serial Parallels
Highlights from this strand vary widely in style, scope, and methodology, coming together to form a riveting portrait of the current state of animation. Max Hattler’s Serial Parallels (Hong Kong, 9 mins.) takes a page out of the experimental notebooks of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, reimagining Hattler’s photography of Hong Kong high-rises into strips of celluloid. The end result is a mesmerizing flurry of patterns and colours, accentuated by a frantic soundscape that evokes the energy of Hong Kong without ever using any real sounds of the region. Through his layering of images and patterns, Hattler has created something that brings up questions of what animation is and can be, a film with physicality and texture usually only seen in stop-motion animation.
Similarly experimental but wildly different, Ho Tsz Wing’s Catgot (Hong Kong, 3 mins.) is a living embodiment of synesthesia, mixing music and explosions of colour to create a dance of imagery. While the premise of imitating a fountain performance through color is simple on its face, the film is anything but: it’s a playful, soothing expression of joy that shows even without images we easily recognize, animation can still manage to inspire deep emotion.
There Were Four of Us
More on the narrative side of things but still daringly unconventional, Cassie Shao’s There Were Four of Us (USA, 7 mins.) captures the melancholia of waking up from a dream through a bold array of animation styles. Using hand drawings, computer-generated imagery, and still photography, Shao overlays the three modes with abandon, creating a hypnotic landscape of moods and images that perfectly captures the wooziness, disappointment, and dread that comes with snapping back to reality.
We Have One Heart
Closing out the programme is Katarzyna Warzecha’s emotional powerhouse We Have One Heart (Poland, 11 mins.), which combines animation with archival documents to create a moving and personal history. Layering real letters and photographs over hand-drawn animation, Warzecha re-tells the true story of a Polish family separated from their patriarch in Iraq due to the difficulties of immigration from the region. The film emerges as both a damning condemnation of European immigration laws and a touching testament to the power of love across great distances. It’s an animated work that manages to bring up all the emotional possibilities of the art form, proving its worth as a powerful tool for empathy and change.