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The Idea Is Everything. Perhaps the most common comment we hear as the cinema spills out after every LIAF screening is “where do they get their ideas from?”. And our annual ‘From Absurd To Zany’ programme is usually the one that provokes that reaction the most often.
You’re welcome.
Andre Breton once said, “The man who cannot visualise a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”
If you’re sitting in an animation festival screening or embarking on a course or a career in animation and you can visualise this horse/tomato encounter – or you can’t but you really want to – then this programme is going to help you throw off the shackles of pseudo-realism peddled by all those ‘well-made-story’ merchants slumming it down in live-action cinema.
On the other hand, if you’re wondering why a horse would be galloping on a tomato or wondering how that could even be possible to depict or why anybody would bother to make it or watch it then you’re probably going to have to work a little harder but we all had to start somewhere.

For those of you under three score and ten, Andre Breton is not the designer of expensive clothes made by slaves in the third world or the face behind a perfume made with water left over from Fukushima and transported around in tankers. Breton was (arguably) the originator and leader of the Surrealists. He took it upon himself to guard and fiercely litigate the core intellectualism that bound together the disparate ingredients of surrealist thought and philosophy. This thankless, cheerless chore became all the more critical (in his mind at least) when the centre of the art world shifted from 1920’s and 30’s Paris to New York as Europe shuddered and then coursed into the molten violence of World War II. Breton was appalled (and probably felt usurped) by what he saw as the crowd-pleasing antics of surrealist-lite Johnny-come-latelys such as Salvador Dali whom, he felt, created work that spoke more outwardly to a potential market than reflected more inwardly upon the sacred core tenets of surrealism.

Breton’s artistic politics were, of course, forged in the aftermath of World War I, one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds humanity has ever carved into itself. As is virtually always the case, the artists figured it out first. World War I was a comprehensive failure of every level of humanity, the theory went, and so when it was over everything – everything – humans did beforehand needed to be viewed with suspicion and examined to see if used-by dates had been reached.
For artists, keeping the candles on by sitting around painting beautifully rendered, appropriately airbrushed renditions of well-fed patrons or their mysterious mistresses was now deemed to be but one of the million moving parts of the cultural tetris that lead humanity into the madness. It was not just a matter of ‘the’ art that had to change, but the very concept of what art was that had to be re-imagined from the ground up.
Not everybody got the memo though. And many who did, weren’t buying. Splotches of colour thrown on a canvas weren’t art and neither were store bought urinals signed “R Mutt”, thank you very much Monsieur Duchamp. Maybe so, but the first responsibility of the artist isn’t to make art, it’s to get themselves to a point where they can get started.

And that’s where things start to get very interesting because, if one journeys along this path the “idea” isn’t really everything after all – at least not one that makes linear, traditional sense. No, that kind of idea is but a pit-stop to change tyres, add more petrol and wipe the bugs off the windshield before a glorious run to the finish line. The “idea” insinuates, but hardly stocktakes, all the little pieces that had to come together before it and it’s of little value if the driver can’t be bothered finishing the race or the car bursts into flames. Simply wallowing around in paint and attempting to provoke creative immolation isn’t (always) a path to creative riches.
“The Idea Is Nothing… It’s What You Do With It That Counts” might be a more accurate battle-cry for artists who wanted to explore the terrain between absurd and zany. Or “Story Is The Least Of Your Worries” sums up a philosophy that perhaps offers some guidance as to how these historical threads feed into the contemporary animation space – plus it has a delicious academically treasonous patina to it. But, alas, man does not live by patina alone and everybody – artist and audience – bring their own unique life experiences to the interaction.

The myriad and distinctive constituent parts of what makes animation – in the right hands and viewed through the right eyes – an artform are a profoundly wide-open permission path to stretch, squeeze, squash, knead, recreate and reinvent any idea into something imaginatively byzantine far beyond the suppressive confines of any vocabulary and the merely literal. To the untrained eye they may be absurd, they may be zany. From absurd to zany might represent a scale on which any given one of these films can be placed according to taste, tolerance or personal interpretation. Or, like the number “12” at the top of the clock which is broached twice daily by the little hand, they might be the same thing and how you see them depends on whether you’re in front of them in the bright light of midday or the darker hours of midnight.
Take from this what you will.
Winding through the various ‘paths least travelled’ that loosely weaves these films together is an often surprisingly razor-sharp take on one or another of life’s challenges and some of the truths we must all face – or turn away from at our peril.

The programme opens as it means to continue with the latest film from Canada’s Claude Cloutier. Bad Seeds is a masterclass in the India-ink-on-paper graphic design style that is instantly recognisable from all of his previous films. There is a richness and a simplicity working in perfect unison here. Gorgeously crafted, gloriously animated imagery that is simultaneously super clean and immediately obvious as the product of a human hand on pen and brush. Goodness knows how many individual drawings this took to complete.
It is so easy to get pulled into Bad Seeds on the artwork alone and missing the subtler messages on the destructive nature of individualism and competition for rare resources that underpin the film and lift it beyond artwork for the sake of imagery alone. It is also easy to let the absurdist humour divert attention from the same thing. Cloutier’s earlier films have all worked a quiet magic in critiquing the ways we have elected to live or the lifestyles a blind-eye have let us fall into and Bad Seeds carries that baton forward.
It’s a similar risk/reward ratio with The Fourth Wall by rising Iranian animation star Mahboobeh Kalaee. This film has turned up in all the festivals that count and its unusual,’ texturally dimensional’ technique is reward alone for the 10 minutes of your attention it asks for. Kalaee has created a compelling ‘real’ environment, placed the camera (thus us!) smack into the maelstrom of it and moves us around like we are rag dolls in a tumbling house. It is one of those films in which the technique is more or less on show; you can sense the hand of the artist making and moving things. You can see how things have been cut out and stuck together. But think of the degree of choreography that has to be brought to bear in this little world that we’ve all entered – and take in how every last ounce of potential is squeezed from it. Don’t let any of that overshadow how much shrewd social commentary is going on here though. The story, a delicate and nuanced tale of striving to overcome, rides shotgun with a more withering pastiche of observations about pre-ordained roles, gender power and the thistles inherent in family dynamics.
The line between absurd/zany and bizarre can be a hair-triggered electric fence to navigate; you can’t climb through an electric fence, you have to step over it and when you try and step over it you’re exposing yourself to all sorts of risks. LIAF revels in its Late Night Bizarre programme and it can be a matter of fine judgement as to which films are wrangled into each.

Any way you want to measure it, films such as See Me (Patty Stenger, Yvonne Kroese) and Eating In The Dark ( Inari Sirola), could both straddle that fence and jump either way. These are textbook examples of works that would confound any ‘pitch’ session for a live-action production or funding request. They only make sense within the realm of animation – they could only have been imagined into reality by somebody who has that capacity to “think like an animator”.
Both create alternative worlds of such utterly complete inner logic that it is difficult to know where to begin in contemplating them. It is akin to landing on an utterly alien planet in which you recognise every piece of the mise-en-scene but have no way of constructing a reality that is fit to report back to Mission Command. Manufacturing these sorts of terrariums is the stepping off point for both films. Once cemented in place, your journey is at their command and you simply have to follow the rules if you want to take the ride.
See Me is a perfect example of the rise of crazy-wild montage animation. Montage animation, of course, never left the house but the ability to digitise the raw ingredients and then really play with them is blowing fresher and fresher winds into those sails. Stenger and Kroese have spoken about just what a steep learning curve it was to master this digital manipulation of the images that ‘star’ in See Me and, doubly so, when it came to ensuring those images interacted with their environments and other elements of the film.
Same but different is the terrain that Russian animator Sasha Svirsky rushes into in his latest film Vadim On A Walk. Like See Me, Svirsky is taking montage to new and strange places, making those images perform in ways that defy logic or ‘normal’ imagination. There’s a kind of alchemy going on here and the arrival of a new Svirsky film at LIAF HQ always brings big excitement. It’s a stretch to classify this as “narrative” but – more than any of his earlier films – there is a kind of interpretive meaning that can be extracted from ‘Vadim’ that his other films don’t really reach for. It’s also a step into a more purely CG aesthetic for Svirsky as well – particularly in the first introductory sequence of the film.
At heart though, it’s just a wonderful and exuberant visual avalanche and it’s totally OK to just enjoy it on that level. Absurd, zany, bizarre – it’s your ticket, your ride.
Malcolm Turner – LIAF Co-Director