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This Weekend: SF International Animation Festival
Tarik Saleh's 'Metropia'
by Amy Crocker
This year’s San Francisco International Animation Festival, running through Sunday, explores the decidedly un-Hollywood side of the art form. From demonstrating Los Angeles traffic scenarios, to an anime documentary about samurai, cartoons are not just for singing princesses.
"I’m interested in showing the margins of what animation is,” said Sean Uyehara, programmer of the festival for the San Francisco Film Society.
With Pixar, Lucasfilm, and the majority of gaming industry in the area, San Francisco seems an apt place to support the festival. But despite the availability of high tech tools, Uyehara explained that this year’s animators went retro."The overriding majority has fallen back toward two dimensional techniques like hand drawn and cell type animation and water colors,” Uyehara said.
One new technique that impressed Uyehara is the photo collage method, with still images animated via tearing or layering. A standout of this method is the film Metropia by Tarik Saleh showing Sunday at 3:30 featuring the voices of Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis.
"The film’s style has an unnerving hyperrealism that expresses the mood perfectly," Uyehara said. "The film is about surveillance and the society of control and the paranoia about the lack of privacy in today’s urban environment."
Another trend in this year’s programming is the increasing use of animation in a non-fictional context. Inspired by the use of animation to teach scientific concepts like cell division and how magnets work, Uyehara booked Joy Mountford at the downtown Apple store today at 4pm to show how motion graphics can be used to deal with large amounts of information.
Mountford comes from a corporate background at Yahoo, where she started using animation as an alternative to spreadsheets and charts to display data. She recently did a study of vehicle traffic in Los Angeles she used animation to show the traffic could be improved.
But it wouldn’t be an animation festival without a little Disney. On Saturday, Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman, authors of Walt in Wonderland and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies, will present a selection of Disney’s Alice Comedies. These silent, ten-minute shorts made between 1923 and 1927 feature a live action girl in a cartoon land.
"Disney used to say it all started with a mouse but it didn’t, it all started with this little girl,” Merritt said.
Walt Disney’s Alice Comedies
The first cartoon in the series, Alice’s Wonderland, was made on spec in Kansas City. He used this pilot to get a contract with Margaret Winkler, the distributor for Felix the Cat. After signing, he moved his animation staff and the four-year-old actress, Virginia Davis, to Hollywood to shoot 56 more.
These rarely shown early works give insight into the learning process of Disney as he experimented with technology and new methods of storytelling. Disney was particularly interested in ways to get cartoon characters to express personality.
“You can see a lot about a character in how they react to changes in stimuli.” Merritt said. “With Disney you discover very early that pain is real. Pain and pleasure and contact have somatic consequences.”
Merritt and Kaufman have selected episodes that show Disney’s improvement as an animator. Audiences will notice the backgrounds become more complicated and the jokes become more involved. One popular gag is to have Alice chasing after someone smaller than she is while the little creature’s mother or father, a big bear or a big lion comes up behind her.
“It’s not just I hit you over your head and then you hit me over my head and then we run away. He prepares the gags and after the gags he delivers its punch line. There’s increasingly an aftermath,” Merritt said.
Adults in the audience may recognize 20s era prohibition jokes in the Alice comedies. Merritt explained that Disney made cartoons for the general audience, not solely for children.
Tickets for all the shows can be purchased on the San Francisco Film Society website.