A staple of Manchester Animation Festival’s line-up is their New Animated Voices showcase. In this screening they play a curated selection of the best animated shorts that have, as they put it, been crafted in the academic environment. This year is no exception, with the festival playing shorts made by students that left me blown away with quite how talented some people are.
The first film played, which went on to win the best student short at the festival’s awards, was titled 12 Inch Pianist. If you’re familiar with the titular joke, that is exactly what the short is. It is a beautifully and expertly crafted stop motion animation of what happens when you take a dumb penis joke to its logical endpoint. The Jury of judges referred to it as “Unexpected. Absurd. Funny.” – that about sums it up. It is the type of project that feels like it is almost undeserving of the immaculate craft that created it and that irony only makes it better.
Following that was another stop-motion short, Double or Nothing. The film by a Swiss team is a high-stakes gangster thriller set in Tokyo, and was a lot of fun. For what it lacks in its use of fairly trope-y writing, it more than makes up for in animation quality. The stop-motion puppetry is great and used impressively in action. The film also uses anime-style 2D animation as CCTV footage which adds even further to the admirable scope of the project is.
There was no shortage of stop-motion on display in this showcase. Arachnophobia, a Slovenian short, is a wordless claymation about what happens when someone puts a spider in their partner’s tea. Its bizarre clay visuals are an absolute delight.
The most surprising use of stop motion is British short Warp and Weft. This short animates various methods of stitching and sewing under voice-over of people speaking about the importance of those crafts to them. While only three minutes, it is a very powerful display of the significance of the hand-crafted, and uses the form to reflect that wonderfully.
One of the most impressive things about the showcase was the sheer amount of delicately-made animation methods. My favourite on a technical level was the film Un tocco angelico which is animated through decorative wood carving. It looks absolutely gorgeous and one can’t help but be struck by how time-consuming the process must have been despite it being just under 3 minutes. It also somewhat miraculously manages to have a compelling narrative alongside the spectacular artistry, telling a love story between two Catholic priests with remarkable emotional efficiency.
There is also plenty of more traditional hand-drawn animation on display. The highlight of these for me, and perhaps my favourite of the festival, was the British short The Eating of an Orange. It tells a very biblical, fable-like tale of a woman coming across and eating an orange, which becomes a spectacle in and of itself. It has a wonderful dreamy energy which wrapped me up completely and flew by, despite being the second longest in the selection.
The event ended with another hand-drawn animation, this time taking a more Adult Swim-esque, cartoony approach. The Undying Pain of Existence is a comedy short about a nude model at a still life class trying desperately to remain still despite everything working against him. In that Adult Swim style, the art becomes rather grotesque (there was definitely a baffled noises from the audience, somewhere between a laugh and an “eww”), but with its short runtime it never becomes too much. While not one of my favourites, it was a good choice to close the showcase.
