Most cartoon fans should be able to find something to enjoy in the 2022 edition of “The Animation Show of Shows,” a 90-minute survey of recent animated short movies. Unfortunately, the juxtaposition of certain shorts also sometimes detracts from their standout qualities.
Most of the ten included short films are technically accomplished and formally adventurous enough to warrant viewers’ attention. Some shorts, like the stick figure coming-of-age drama “Aurora,” also look corny or trite when compared with others. The piecemeal nature of this sort of omnibus also does a particular disservice to experimental or non-narrative shorts, like the playful and impossible-to-synopsize hand-drawn short “Zoizoglyphe.”
The first hour of this year’s “Animation Show of Shows” focuses on new shorts from the past two-plus years, since the series was put on hiatus during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The last half hour of this program highlights a newly restored short from 1987: “The Man Who Planted Trees,...
Most of the ten included short films are technically accomplished and formally adventurous enough to warrant viewers’ attention. Some shorts, like the stick figure coming-of-age drama “Aurora,” also look corny or trite when compared with others. The piecemeal nature of this sort of omnibus also does a particular disservice to experimental or non-narrative shorts, like the playful and impossible-to-synopsize hand-drawn short “Zoizoglyphe.”
The first hour of this year’s “Animation Show of Shows” focuses on new shorts from the past two-plus years, since the series was put on hiatus during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The last half hour of this program highlights a newly restored short from 1987: “The Man Who Planted Trees,...
- 12/29/2022
- by Simon Abrams
- The Wrap
When Studio Ghibli is mentioned, one tends to think, first, of the great films of Hayao Miyazaki whose Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke drew widespread attention to the Japanese animation studio a decade ago. Images come to mind of determined heroines defying gravity as they swoop over bright blue seas and through pure white clouds – and of worlds full of biplane-flying pigs, folkloric forest creatures and bizarre, yet oddly toyetic, seed-planting monsters.
Yet in 1999, whilst riding high off of the success of the action heavy crowd-pleaser Princess Mononoke, Studio Ghibli made a bold change of direction with the release of My Neighbours the Yamadas – an offbeat and stylised film about the day-to-day life of a family of five, now available for the first time on Blu-ray.
Director, Isao Takahata, had long been a counterbalance against the work of Miyazaki prior to Yamadas, with the tragic Grave of the Fireflies and...
Yet in 1999, whilst riding high off of the success of the action heavy crowd-pleaser Princess Mononoke, Studio Ghibli made a bold change of direction with the release of My Neighbours the Yamadas – an offbeat and stylised film about the day-to-day life of a family of five, now available for the first time on Blu-ray.
Director, Isao Takahata, had long been a counterbalance against the work of Miyazaki prior to Yamadas, with the tragic Grave of the Fireflies and...
- 5/25/2011
- by Robert Beames
- Obsessed with Film
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