Frameline 29: Queermation
Yay cartoons! In addition to screening Charlotte's Web next Sunday, Frameline has compiled a lovely collection of eleven gayish animated shorts. Some are fun, some are preachy, some are incomprehensibly artsy, but all are under fifteen minutes. Whoo hoo!
The strongest of the bunch: Powerplay, a hilarious Dutch cartoon about a massive dom and the puny sub who loves him. The Warner-Brothers-ish superstretchy style sets a great wacky tone for the silly, horrifying acts that they perform. As the long-suffering and blissful bottom gets squished, inflated, flattened, and stretched, you almost expect Wile E. Coyote or Daffy Duck to suddenly pop up in drag to join him -- but then again, we're always expecting that.
We also enjoyed Listen, (linked page contains embedded Quicktime) a simple series of line-drawings in which dialogue between a mother and her gay daughter appear physically as speech bubbles. Bubbles with lines like "You should come here to live" drift by easily and uselessly, while scarier ones such as "I have a girlfriend" and "we f**k like rabbits" are either thrown aside, or pile up, unacknowledged, until they overwhelm the room.
John and Michael is a swirling brown finger-painting-styled short about two developmentally disabled men in a relationship. Not quite treacly (though very very close), it's sweet and heartwarming and touching and everything else that stories about retarded love generally are. Also good: Sigmund Freud: Professional Psychoanalyst, an extremely low-budget puppet show (we're talking, like, a handful of quarters and a dollar-off coupon), in which familiar action figures and kids' TV characters lament their neurosis, and are diagnosed as repressed homosexuals. Jokes about the preferences of a certain purple creature from a grassy planet on public television are nothing new, but we still like laughing at them. It's a shame that the insufficient protection granted by our country's limited fair-use laws pretty much guarantee that few people will ever see this short.
In Fallen, one of the few lesbian shorts, two women share a house but not a source of gravity. One lives on the floor, and the other on the ceiling, and yet they're still in love. Awwww. Lonely 15 is a saccharine story about dick size, focusing on a insecure gay kid and his own stunted pants monster. Evading his mother's question about his own sexuality, he nervously posits that all humans are bisexual; she shrieks, "does that mean that you can imagine me with another woman?" ...which causes her son to run to the bathroom and vomit. Ha ha! Golden. Lonely 15 is a fast, fun story, but it's over before you can figure out what it's about. And even more dizzying is Granny Queer, a professionally-done animation about two mature, rather trashy ladies and their search for some stolen bloomers. An Adult-Swim-ish undercurrent runs throughout, down to the superflat 2-D style and the discomforting wobbly sound effect that accompanies one character's saggy bosoms.
Christopher and Gordy is a parable so thinly veiled it's basically naked. A hypocritical sinner becomes president, commits foreign atrocities, attracts the ire of the Lord, and is eventually condemned. Meanwhile, all the gays on whom he's ever hated wind up dancing in heaven, which turns out to be a gay disco in the sky. Apparantly, for fags, Heaven means validation of their music and dance choices. Y'know, given the choice between an endless, firey, boozy hell and a crowded queeny disco cloud, we're not sure which we'd pick. Anyway, this short teaches us that hating GWB is fun, but it's even funner when he's a grotesque caricature.
You couldn't ask for a more artistic title than Dreaming is for Moonrise's, could you? This Chinese short is about, um, we're not sure. But if you like looking at swirly blue drawings of butterflies, stairs, vines, and lesbians, hey, you're in luck. And as a special bonus, the piece features the piano stylings of the song "Moonlight Sonata," which is how you know it's artistic. Another self-impressed piece that doesn't add up to much: With What Shall I Wash, a slow, deliberate montage of trannies and hookers and bathhouses. Add in a mournful operatic soundtrack, slow pans, lots of meaningful gazes, and some communist and religious iconography that's apropos of nothing, and poof -- an instant piece of art. Well, it's a piece of something.