1001 Animated Shorts You Must See - Part 15

DIR: Karsten Kiilerich, Stefan Fjeldmark

SUMMARY: A series of animations set to the narration of children interviewed on the subject of death.

WHY IT'S HERE: Karsten Kiilerich and Stefan Fjeldmark's 'When Life Departs' has a simple and potentially manipulative premise which is fortunately executed with balance and emotional intelligence. The short is based around a series of interviews with children about their understanding of death. Kiilerich and Fjeldmark have set these interviews to simple line drawings imitating children's illustrations, recalling the techniques used in John Halas's 'Children and Cars' and Tim Webb's 'A is for Autism'. The animation works effectively but is rather upstaged by the interviews themselves, which range from whimsical approximations of the afterlife to genuinely heartbreaking accounts of personal tragedy, such as a young boy who longs to hold the baby brother he lost to cancer one more time. Ultimately though, 'When Life Departs' is not a maudlin film and is more interested in perspectives than obsessed with death. It ends on an upbeat note with a child declaring that she really doesn't think about death much because she has so much living left to do!

DIR: Gil Alkabetz

SUMMARY: An extended, ludicrous solution to the old puzzle of how to transport a wolf, sheep and cabbage across a river without them eating each other.

WHY IT'S HERE: Israeli director Gil Alkabetz's 'Rubicon' is a hysterically funny take on that old wolf, sheep and cabbage puzzle that is lazily pulled out at pretty much every motivational team-building seminar. It's a simple puzzle which most people crack in a matter of seconds but Alkabetz has thought outside the box, outside the boat and outside the reach of the average person's imagination! In his extended and questionable solution to the puzzle, the point of the exercise is quickly lost as Alkabetz works his way through every combination he can think of and then begins to turn things on their head as the characters exchange clothes, position, species and eventually degenerate into pieces of floating matter. An absolutely brilliant little surrealist satire, 'Rubicon' challenges the viewer to guess what's coming next and then confounds them at every turn. This should be shown at every team-building seminar from now on!

DIR: Jan Pinkava

SUMMARY: An elderly man plays against himself at chess for a very important prize.

WHY IT'S HERE: The first Pixar short for eight years, 'Geri's Game' was an important short for the studio. Although they made several important and popular shorts in the 80s, they had since been put on hold to focus on development of ground-breaking feature films 'Toy Story' and 'A Bug's Life'. 'Geri's Game' was the first Pixar film of any kind to have a human main character. The titular Geri is a wonderful creation, with a deeply expressive face and a playful nature visible in his every movement as he plays himself at chess. 'Geri's Game' was instrumental in rejuvenating the Pixar short and making it a regular accompaniment to the studio's feature films, a tradition that was cemented by the even more popular 'For The Birds' a few years later. Pixar tipped their hat to Geri's importance when he reappeared in a cameo role as a toy restorer in 'Toy Story 2'.

DIR: Steve Moore

SUMMARY: Haunted by his failure to capture Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf is convinced he has learned from his mistakes and could make a better stab at it if he only had another chance. So he builds a time machine.

WHY IT'S HERE: Disney's 'Redux Riding Hood' is an atypical Disney cartoon which breaks with the style and tone most readily associated with the studio. An anarchically animated, dryly humourous short about a wolf's obsession with his inability to catch Red Riding Hood, 'Redux Riding Hood' has a great voice cast including Mia Farrow, Michael Richards and Adam West. It's scathing wit and darker tone are a precursor to Disney's underrated 2000 feature 'The Emperor's New Groove'. This tone was the result of Disney hiring sitcom veteran Dan O'Shannon to create a short series of adult-oriented rewrites of fairy stories due to be called 'Totally Twisted Fairy Tales'. Ultimately, the series never got any further than this one short but what a great short it is, throwing out the Disney rulebook and retelling a classic story with added Sci-Fi elements and the inspired lunatic idea of having the Big Bad Wolf be married to a sheep! Perhaps due to its un-Disney like tone, the studio have kept the short buried since its release despite the fact that it was Oscar nominated.

DIR: Craig Welch

SUMMARY: An isolated inventor attempts to unlock the riddle of how wings are attached to angels but he is consumed by vague obsessions that conflict with his automated world of total control.

WHY IT'S HERE: Craig Welch's National Film Board of Canada short 'How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels' is a dark, elusive creation in which an obsessive inventor attempts to find answers to the unknowable while he longs for an ethereal representation of a woman. That the film is hard to understand seems to be in keeping with its themes of the limits of human understanding and the folly of wasting a life trying to understand that which is beyond us. This could be interpreted as either a sanctification or rejection of religion but the film is unclear on this point also. What is clear is what a beautifully made short this is. The elaborate machines and wide-eyed emaciated protagonist are both eerie and blackly comic and while the apparent lack of philosophical weight here may frustrate, it also acts as a trigger for all manner of discussion. This being the case, Welch may well feel that he achieved his goal.

DIR: Don Hertzfeld

SUMMARY: A disastrously awkward blind date is evaluated in retrospect by its participants, Lily and Jim

WHY IT'S HERE: Don Hertzfeld's third student film and probably the most conventional work in his remarkable catalogue, 'Lily and Jim' is a record of social awkwardness and the stupid things it can cause us to do to avoid embarrassment. An animated film that is largely static, relying on brilliantly observed little movements and the hilarious semi-improvised dialogue of Karin Anger and Robert May as Lily and Jim, 'Lily and Jim' is realistically painful to watch, in the same style that many sitcoms of the 90s were moving towards. Although it is undoubtedly a film of small moments, 'Lily and Jim' does build to a big laugh in the final act when Jim is too polite to admit that he is highly allergic to coffee. Although it is usually seen as a minor work in comparison with what came afterwards, 'Lily and Jim' is also a funny film filled with promise and a more realistically grounded humour than the audacious innovations of Hertzfeldt's subsequent work.

DIR: Daniel Greaves

SUMMARY: Matt Phlatt lives in a flat, paper world with his cat Geoff and his fish Chips. When a freak electrical accident connects Flatworld with the artificial world of TV, Matt get implicated in a robbery by a TV burglar who has escaped from the screen.

WHY IT'S HERE: British animator Daniel Greaves won an Oscar first time out for his student film 'Manipulation' in 1991. I've always felt that 'Manipulation' was one of the least deserving animated short Oscar winners as it simply replayed the old animator-vs-creation scenario from films like the Fleischer Brothers' #Out of the Inkwell' shorts and Chuck Jones's 'Duck Amuck'. Six years after his Oscar victory however, Greaves released a half-hour short that immediately marked him out as on of Britain's most exciting talents in the medium. 'Flatworld' is an intricate, beautiful, funny and gripping film about a man, his cat and his fish who all live in a world made out of paper. This allows for lots of great visual gags, such a road workers using staplers and the protagonist shaving with an eraser, but while a lesser talent may have made these gags the thrust of the entire piece, Greaves demotes them to delightful background jokes, opting instead to introduce a second contrasting world into his story; the world of TV. Due to a freak electrical accident, the colourful, eventful world of TV is linked to the drab Flatworld by way of puddles, through which Matt, Geoff and Chips can enter and exit. Unfortunately, this also allows for a TV burglar to escape his world and rob Flatworld's bank, pinning the crime of Matt in the process. The rest of the film is one long chase with the police on Matt's tail in Flatworld, while Geoff and Chips attempt to beat the burglar in TV world with the help of a handy remote control. The sheer amount of ideas going on in 'Flatworld' is astonishing and it is so well executed that I would have loved to see Greaves work this gem of a short up into a full-length feature. As it is, we have one of the jewels of short animation instead, an absolute delight of a half-hour which I only wish was more well-known and readily available.

DIR: Bill Plympton

SUMMARY: A series of short comedy sketches mostly relating to the themes of sex and violence.

WHY IT'S HERE: As his career continued into the 90s, Bill Plmypton's shorts began to feature more explicit material more regularly. Having well and truly opened the door with 'How to Make Love to a Woman', Plympton persisted in his wry examination of human sexuality with 'Sex and Violence'. A series of very short animated sketches in the style of his early short 'Plymptoons', 'Sex and Violence' is not a consistently filthy short. There are two or three explicit gags (including the opening one, which sets up expectations for the film) but they never feel gratuitous because Plympton always has a very funny or unexpected punchline ready. From a sexual point of view, the film could be best summed up by a sketch involving God's preliminary drawing for how sex should work, which involves the insertion of various appendages into various holes, none of which are used for sex in the final design. This is Plympton highlighting the oddity of sex as well as the joy of it. The violence themed gags are given considerably more screen time but again, these are all of a cartoonishly grotesque nature rather than disturbing or alarming. All in all, 'Sex and Violence' is another brilliant Plympton short which will appeal to fans of his work and no doubt repulse non-fans. Plmypton would go on to make a feature-length masterpiece of sex and violence in 'I Married a Strange Person' the same year.

DIR: Steve Box

SUMMARY: Music hall dog juggler Tiny finds his career taking a nosedive with the arrival of cinema and the bullying influence of film star Arnold Hugh.

WHY IT'S HERE: Steve Box's wonderfully weird 'Stage Fright' was one of Aardman Animation's projects that was never designed to be a commercial success but founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton felt it was important to continue innovating alongside their more commercial projects. Box, who worked with Nick Park on the previous two Wallace and Gromit films and who would later co-direct the feature 'Curse of the Were-Rabbit', has here created something very different from Park's shorts. 'Stage Fright' is a spoof melodrama but the humour is secondary to the film's commitment to its story of a tyrannical bully and his hold over two colleagues. All three characters are voiced by British character comedian Graham Fellows, famous for his creation John Shuttleworth. The attention to detail in the film's depiction of the changeover from music hall to cinema is excellent, with the mock silent films being the funniest thing in the short. Overall, 'Stage Fright' is an inventive, dramatic but tongue-in-cheek gem that baffled many newcomers to Aardman's stall but delighted those who were more familiar with their lesser-known and darker films like 'Babylon' or 'Loves Me, Loves Me Not'.

DIR: Jeremy Moorshead, Debra Smith

SUMMARY: A crowd gathers to watch a man perform a high-wire act.

WHY IT'S HERE: Debra Smith and Jeremy Moorshead's 'El Caminante' is a wonderfully atmospheric depiction of an event that captures the imagination of a small town. The film eschews plot in favour of capturing the feeling of participating in an event, as a high-wire artist holds the crowd in thrall. Making brilliant use of music to establish setting and mood, 'El Caminante' is beautifully drawn and makes you feel both part of the crowd of spectators and, once the daring feat is underway, as if you are the high-wire artist yourself. In five short minutes, 'El Caminante' transports the viewer to a whole different place.

DIR: Phil Mulloy

SUMMARY: The meaning of artistic freedom is examined through the recollections of Romanian violinist Alexander Balanescu.

WHY IT'S HERE: Coming of the back of his controversial 'Ten Commandments' series, cult animator Phil Mulloy made one of his most heartfelt, different and winning films with 'The Wind of Changes'. Although there are elements of Mulloy's brand of extreme satire here, they are largely secondary to an intimate, passionate portrait of a man struggling towards a freedom of expression that is not available to him in his native Romania and doesn't come as easily as one might expect in either New York or London. Balanescu's recollections of his first violin and his subsequent journey are moving in their vividness and eloquence, while the insistent, repetitive score, also contributed by Balanescu, is hypnotic, fantastic and mesmerically grating all at once. It perfectly compliments Mulloy's brilliant imagery and the film emerges as a unique, philosophical biography by a filmmaker whose work is too often pigeon-holed as crudely rendered and reliant on extreme imagery and shock humour. The true depth of what Mulloy does at his best neatly ties in with the themes of 'The Wind of Changes', a short which undoubtedly captures him at the peak of his powers.

DIR: Phil Mulloy

SUMMARY: When a small child's messy red daubing is cruelly thrown away, it sparks a chain reaction in which the drawing's worth is reassessed to the point where people are willing to kill to obtain it.

WHY IT'S HERE: Phil Mulloy is an animator whose work is regularly misrepresented as crude, ugly and based mainly around shock value. While Mulloy's work does depict extremes of human nature, it clearly does so from a humanist point of view. Mulloy see the world for what it could be and then depicts it for what it is, which is comparatively desolate and disturbing. While he generally peppers his satires with black humour, 'The Chain' is perhaps one of his bleakest works, reflected in the black backgrounds that hang heavy throughout the film. The humour in 'The Chain' is mainly in its concept of a child's drawing being mistaken for a treasure map of El Dorado and the juxtaposition between the triviality of the actual item and the lengths people are willing to go to in order to obtain it. The chain reaction seems to stem from the cruelty inflicted on the child at the beginning of the short, showing how domestic attitudes seep into the culture to the effect that they can affect events on a global scale. A masterful piece of satirical animation, 'The Chain' was created as part of a season of films for Channel 4 based around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, further evidence of Mulloy's humanist intentions that are so frequently and blindly ignored.

DIR: Chris Landreth

SUMMARY: A man is psychologically battered into believing that he is a clown named Bingo, despite knowing full-well that he is not.

WHY IT'S HERE: Made to demonstrate the capabilities of then-new animation software Maya, Chris Landreth's 'Bingo' is an animated version of experimental theatre group The Neo Futurists play 'Disregard This Play'. A metaphor for the way in which the world around us shapes our identities, often against our will, 'Bingo' uses computer animation to achieve things that would be very difficult to stage in a live-action performance. The opening sequence, in which an initially friendly clown gets angrier and physically larger each time the protagonist denies that he is Bingo the Clown, is terrifying and brutally effective. While Landreth's extremely realistic human characters help demonstrate the capabilities of Maya, 'Bingo' goes even further in demonstrating the growth of Landreth as a director. His staging of this short piece is superb and feels like a step up from his Oscar-nominated debut 'The End'. Unsurprisingly, Landreth was on the cusp of directing an Oscar winning masterpiece with his very next film.

DIR: Chris Wedge

SUMMARY: A widowed rabbit who misses her husband visited by a troublesome moth.

WHY IT'S HERE: American director Chris Wedge's 'Bunny' is a computer animated short from Blue Sky Studios. Blue Sky have always been behind the pack in terms of quality as far as I'm concerned. Their animated features, beginning with the popular 'Ice Age' in 2002, have always lacked the charm and innovation of their contemporaries. But in 1998, they made waves with the brilliant, sombre and touching short 'Bunny' which went on to win an Oscar. Wedge based the short's artwork on the Uncle Wiggily illustrations by Lansing Campbell. The short also features wonderful use of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan's 'Bend Down the Branches'. The computer animation is terrific for its time but what has marked the film out for most praise is its surprisingly sombre tone, as the central character struggles with the loss of her husband and slowly comes to realise the significance of her nocturnal visitor. There is nothing particularly deep about the simple story but it hits many people on a gut-level with its simple, affectionate storytelling. 'Bunny' seemed to promise great things from Wedge but unfortunately his subsequent films have largely been mediocre product like 'Robots' and 'Epic'.

DIR: Mark Osborne

SUMMARY: An inventor attempts to break away from the drudgery of daily life by coming up with a miracle product, but he finds little relief in the subsequent changes the invention brings to his life.

WHY IT'S HERE: Mark Osborne's stop-motion 'More', in which an inventor in a cold, colourless world invents a miracle product but finds that his success changes him in a vital way, instantly became one of the most popular animated shorts of all time, for a long while holding the top spot of IMDB's greatest animated shorts. It's a phenomenally atmospheric, moving and haunting piece of work and, retrospectively, most people have agreed that it should have won the award for 1998 instead of Chris Wedge's 'Bunny'. Packing a profound little plot into just six minutes, 'More' is visually appealing even as its downbeat story heads towards its numbing conclusion with a chilling inevitability. The success of 'More' gave Osborne's career in animation a leg-up and he went on to co-direct Dreamworks' 'Kung Fu Panda', one of the best films the studio has made so far.

DIR: Don Hertzfeld

SUMMARY: A small child's balloon suddenly and inexplicably turns against him, sparking similar instances of balloon attacks across the country.

WHY IT'S HERE: Don Hertzfeldt's final student film 'Billy's Balloon' is a key work in terms of defining the director's sense of humour and particularly his exquisite comic timing. The combination of the amusing and mildly horrifying that would surface again in Hertzfeldt's subsequent work is to the fore here, as a young boy is put through a series of tortures by his balloon. The idea is simple but strange enough to be funny in and of itself but Hertzfeldt gets six minutes of mileage out of it through the deliberately unusual pacing of several of the jokes, as well at the perfectly captured looks of shock on his characters' faces. With his 21st century films Hertfeldt became more ambitious, combining big laughs and blackly comic subject matter with a philosophical outlook and moments of quiet pathos.

DIR: Pjotr Sapegin

SUMMARY: A man moves into a house only to find it is inhabited by a very large rat who is impossible to get rid of.

WHY IT'S HERE: Russian animator Pjotr Sapegin's 'Huset pa Kampen' is a funny, strange and delightful little story about a man's quest to remove a large rat from his home. He tries poison, traps and even a cat but the rat mistakes his attempts to kill it for romantic courtship. Animated in fluid Claymation, 'Huset pa Kampen' is an oddity whose target audience is unclear. It is a little like a warped fairy story but there is an extremely brief moment in the opening of the film which suggests that this was not meant for a young audience, as two bugs frantically copulate. Whoever it was meant for however, 'Huset pa Kampen' seems to be a film with the capacity to charm just about any audience, even if it may also raise a few eyebrows as it does so.

DIR: Piet Kroon

SUMMARY: The tragic story of two lovers is told through a series of flashbacks of their exploits in various locations across the world.

WHY IT'S HERE: Piet Kroon's 'T.R.A.N.S.I.T.' is an exquisite, tragic romance which packs an epic tale into just 12 minutes. The story of the illicit and ultimately violent affair between Emmy, the wife of an oil tycoon, and Oscar, a man whose chance encounter with Emmy leads to adultery and murder, 'T.R.A.N.S.I.T.' is told backwards, with the story slowly becoming clear with each puzzle piece. The film is split into seven sections, each animated by a different animator and set at a different world destination. The destinations are listed on souvenir stickers on a piece of luggage which becomes a symbol of Emmy and Oscar's relationship and Kroon uses this device to keep a tight grip on his potentially confusing narrative, zooming in to each sticker as we change destination, with the dwindling amount of stickers on the luggage clueing us in to the fact that the story is in reverse. Although the styles of each sequence subtly change, the overall style is Art Deco, reflecting the 1920s setting of the film. Without dialogue and with a commendable economy of storytelling, Kroon has created a mini-masterpiece in 'T.R.A.N.S.I.T.', a beautiful tale of sordid treachery and jealous passions.

DIR: Paul Driessen

SUMMARY: Three damsels in distress await their knights in shining armour: a woman who has fallen off a building, a woman who has been tied to a train track and a fairy princess about to be given a poisoned apple.

WHY IT'S HERE: Paul Driessen's terrific '3 Misses' is one of the director's funniest films. The short is divided into 3 sections involving a different damsel in distress in each case. An modern day urban story sees a woman fall off a skyscraper while a man battles the perils of the city to try and save her. In the Old West, a cowboy tries to get to a woman tied to a train track before the next train passes through. And in a fairy tale kingdom, the seven dwarves rush to prevent Snow White from eating a poisoned apple, although they must contend with interruptions from various other fairy tale characters and an ever-dwindling supply of dwarves. Across these three stories, Driessen presents us with a series of cracking jokes and running gags, even having his three worlds occasionally and inexplicably coincide. The animation is positively alive with energy and the final punchline is absolutely brilliant.

DIR: Sheldon Cohen

SUMMARY: A lonely girl who lives in an isolated cabin wishes for a pet to keep her company. Her wish is granted by the North Wind but the result is a snow cat, who can never be permitted to enter her warm cabin.

WHY IT'S HERE: Sheldon Cohen's beautiful adaptation of the children's story by Dayal Kaur Khalsa is a magical little creation with many layers. Bookended by colourful sequences in which a grandmother tells her granddaughter the story, 'Snow Cat' never loses the cosiness of these framing portions of the narrative, particularly with Maureen Stapleton's warm delivery of the narrative, and yet the story itself is rendered in chilly white line drawings against a black background. Cohen uses these white images ingeniously. The world outside the cabin is icy white and you can feel the chilliness in every frame, while inside the cabin the crackling fire plays against the white lines in a way that makes you feel toasty warm. The story itself is a terrific metaphor for coming to terms with death. It was written by Khalsa when she was beset with both her father's suicide and her own diagnosis of terminal cancer. She used her final years to write many children's books, including the wonderful 'Snow Cat' which deftly weaves the themes of death into its story without making it too devastating. Children should pick up on the main themes but perhaps in an abstract way that will become clearer to them as the memory of the film re-emerges in later life.

DIR: Phil Mulloy

SUMMARY: A series of sexual acts are demonstrated by chairs.

WHY IT'S HERE: Having made some of his most powerful and serious films in 'The Wind of Changes' and 'The Chain', Phil Mulloy's 'The Sexlife of a Chair' feels like something of a break from the bigger issues, and yet it is also a spot-on satire on contemporary obsessions with sex and a comic desexualisation of potentially titillating and disturbing material. In some ways reminiscent of Bill Plympton's examinations of the ludicrousness of the sexual act, 'Mulloy's film uses minimal animation to depict a series of sexual acts using chairs. A German narrator reads out each heading in his native language, his voice becoming bizarrely distorted as the film progresses. We open with the heading 'Celibacy', which is depicted by a simple picture of a chair sat alone doing nothing. The heading 'Masturbation' simple shows the chair's seat moving rhythmically backwards and forwards. The juxtaposition of sexuality and something as mundane is at first oddly incongruous and slowly becomes hilarious, particularly when the images are at their most bland. For instance, the provocative heading 'Group Sex' is followed by an image of two rows of chairs, uniformly arranged as if for a small function like a church fete. Mulloy highlights this by adding a wood-panelled floor to the image, a small detail that is somehow crucial in making the joke ten times funnier. 'The Sexlife of a Chair' may not be Mulloy's most brilliant work but it is certainly more insightful and funny than many people give it credit for. If all you see is a series of cheap laughs, you're not looking hard enough.

DIR: Wendy Tilby, Amanda Forbis

SUMMARY: A moment of urban tragedy causes a pig to consider the interconnectedness at the heart of city living.

WHY IT'S HERE: Canadian duo Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis's amazing 'When the Day Breaks', a rivetingly unusual piece about interconnected lives. It stars a cast of anthropomorphic animals and opens like a sweet but artistically sumptuous little family tale. However, the plot takes a deeply unexpected, dark turn which sends the short into unexpected philosophical territory and pushes it into greatness. Anyone hoping for a straightforward plot will likely be disappointed with 'When the Day Breaks' and the use of anthropomorphic animals probably caused these expectations to confound many. But there is an evening's worth of discussion to be had from this wonderful film, both from a philosophical point of view and about the astonishing painterly artwork which is quite unlike the average animated film. 'When the Day Breaks' is a masterpiece then, but a challenging one for those who want food for thought as well as for their eyes.

DIR: Tim Hope

SUMMARY: A scientist in a secluded woodland observatory falls in love with the moon and unleashes a wild side that is in sharp contrast with his usual serenity.

WHY IT'S HERE: An immediate cult hit and a favourite for broadcast on late night Channel 4, British animator Tim Hope's extraordinary 'The Wolf Man' is the sort of short animation that stays with you long after you've seen it and surely lead to sleepless nights for many of those viewers seeing it at 1am like I first did. Alluringly strange and creepy yet also hysterically funny in its combination of poetic and ludicrous language and the sudden violent shift from serene to anarchically visceral, 'The Wolf Man' is instantly identifiable as a product of the late-90s/early 2000s when troubling surrealist comedy was coming into fashion with shows like Chris Morris's 'Jam'. It's no surprise to learn that Hope himself used to perform in a comedy team with 'The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt, whose creations Old Gregg and The Crack Fox provide similar comedic chills. 'The Wolf Man' has an incredible look to it, as Hope makes a 3D universe from simple 2D cutout images, while actor and composer Waen Shepherd is perfect as the voice of the scientist. 'The Wolf Man' ultimately plays as an amazingly evocative crumbling of a fragile mind in isolation.

DIR: Borge Ring

SUMMARY: A young boy's idyllic existence with his loving family is destroyed by the influence of a drug dealer.

WHY IT'S HERE: A new film by Borge Ring is always a cause for celebration. Although Ring rarely directs, his style is instantly recognisable as that which won him an Oscar for the classic 'Anna and Bella' in the 80s. 'Run of the Mill' explores the themes of drug addiction using Ring's distinctive cartoony by densely symbolist style. Unlike many heavy-handed anti-drug films which probably only pique young people's interest in substance abuse through their stuffy authoritarianism, 'Run of the Mill' takes a different approach. Clichés such as the broken home, the rebellious teenager or the exaggerated descent into destitution are foregone in favour of a much more realistic slide into addiction and rather than portray it as merely damaging for the addict, Ring's film very much focuses on the effect it has on those around them. The final image, of the relapses boy drifting carefree in a bubble while his loving parents sit atop it engulfed in black clouds is a powerful reminder that, while it may ultimately be our own choice what we do to our bodies, we are not the only ones who are affected by this choice. Sadly, Ring slightly overplays his hand at the very last minute with a hackneyed image of a broken hobby horse, the sort of crass symbolism that he so skilfully avoids throughout the rest of the film.

DIR: Eugene Fedorenko, Rose Newlove

SUMMARY: A man decides to leave his village and head to Warsaw but when he makes a stop along the way he accidentally heads back in the same direction, encountering a village which he believes to be a sort of parallel universe of the one he left.

WHY IT'S HERE: Based on the humorous Jewish folk tales of Chelm, Eugene Fedorenko and Rose Newlove's National Film Board of Canada short 'Village of Idiots' is a terrific film which really captures the atmosphere of an old folk tale through its dusty colour palette and earnestly narrated story. Fedorenko and Newlove were previously responsible for one of my least favourite animated Oscar winners, the supremely annoying 'Every Child', but 'Village of Idiots' is a completely different film in terms of quality and style. Combining an appealing storybook animation style with titbits of other styles such as model animation and simple line drawings, Fedorenko and Newlove tell the tale of Chelm, a village of affable but idiotic residents, with particular focus on Shmendrick, a man who leaves the village and his family behind only to stumble right back there but somehow remain unaware that this is the same Chelm he left. As Shmendrick takes over the life of what he assumes is a parallel Shmendrick who also left this carbon copy of Chelm, the story says much about the power of perspectives. Very funny but with a strange wisdom mixed in there somewhere, 'Village of Idiots' is a terrific short.

DIR: Konstantin Bronzit

SUMMARY: A house that teeters atop a mountain is constantly affected by the actions of its inhabitants.

WHY IT'S HERE: Russian animator Konstantin Bronzit's 'At the Ends of the Earth' is a short animation with a very simple premise which manages to fill eight minutes by virtue of Bronzit's great sense of comedic timing. The majority of the film is one shot of a house which teeters on the tip of a mountain and rocks backwards and forwards as its inhabitants perform their daily tasks. Among these inhabitants is a large cow which is practically the size of the house itself. The characters' reactions and the silences between them are what makes the film so amusing and Bronzit manages to stretch the material about as far as it can plausibly go. Events occur at exactly the right moments to elicit the biggest laughs possible. 'At the Ends of the Earth' is ultimately a very tight little short in which everything is worked out minutely and yet it exudes a loose, comedy charm that never makes it seem overworked.

DIR: Alexsandr Petrov

SUMMARY: An adaptation of Ernest Hemmingway's story of a man's epic battle to catch a large marlin.

WHY IT'S HERE: Russian animator Alexsandr Petrov is surely one of the greatest artists working in animation and yet his earlier shorts are films I always struggled to connect with more than on a visual basis. With his Ernest Hemmingway adaptation 'The Old Man and the Sea' however, Petrov combined his astonishing animated paintings with perhaps the perfect source material to compliment their style. Petrov has always favoured the slow, philosophical narrative and Hemmingway's story marries up perfectly with this approach, allowing Petrov to create stunning worlds with his paintings of oceans, beaches and wildlife. Petrov paints on glass, using a variety of brushes as well as his fingertips to achieve a realistic aesthetic quality that is to die for when brought to life on screen. This technique is used by few animators because it is so intricate and time consuming. Work on 'The Old Man and the Sea took Petrov and his son over two years and consisted of over 29,000 frames. Having been twice nominated in the past, 'The Old Man and the Sea' finally won Petrov his Oscar and there really was no competition. Despite it being a very strong year (Paul Driessen's '3 Misses', Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis's 'When the Day Breaks' and Torill Kove's 'My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts' were all also nominated), Petrov's perfect twenty minute masterpiece stood head and shoulders above the competition. This is a film to genuinely treasure.

DIR: Adam Elliot

SUMMARY: Adam Elliot reminiscences about his cousin who had cerebral palsy.

WHY IT'S HERE: Adam Elliot's first professional film is the middle film in a wonderful, heartfelt, darkly comic trilogy about family that began with his student film 'Uncle'. While 'Uncle' was a fictionalised series of remembrances loosely based on Elliot's many uncles, 'Cousin' focuses specifically on Elliot's real cousin who has cerebral palsy. Although it doesn't go into great detail about the condition, 'Cousin' aims instead to give a glimpse of the life of a specific child with cerebral palsy, how he coped with the condition and how it effected his relationships with others. What makes this such a well-written piece is that the cerebral palsy is almost incidental to the film. It is the reason behind many of the actions that occur but it is the events and relationships that are of most interest to both director and audience. Like 'Uncle' before it, 'Cousin' is a richly multi-layered piece which is neither depressing nor uplifting but thoroughly engaging.

DIR: Shane Acker

SUMMARY: A man dispatches a dog begging for his corn chips with a cruel slap. But when he discovers a hangnail on his index finger, the dog wreaks a terrible revenge.

WHY IT'S HERE: American director Shane Acker's debut short 'The Hangnail' is one of the most joyously grotesque, wince-inducing two minutes of animation you'll ever see. Acker, who would go on to work with more sophisticated computer animation, here works with charmingly simple hand-drawn cartoons of a man and a dog. The short follows a simple narrative pattern: set up a bully and a victim and then swoop in immediately for the comeuppance. In this case, the comeuppance is so horrendously violent and yet so fantastically hilarious that the viewer can't help but smile even as they cringe. The first time I saw 'The Hangnail' I was so shocked that I instantly watched it a second time. It's an absolute blast and a great early student film for a man who would quickly become a major animation talent.

DIR: Regina Pessoa

SUMMARY: A little girl who receives little attention from her mother finds her loneliness manifesting itself as frightening noises in the night.

WHY IT'S HERE: Portuguese animator Regina Pessoa's 'A Noite' is a subtly affecting film in which a wide-eyed little girl who cannot connect with her mother experiences a fearful night in bed as she hears whispering voices and chilling laughter. Although it is slightly creepy, 'A Noite' is not aiming to be yet another cheaply frightening short like Paul Berry's 'The Sandman'. Rather, it taps into the psychological state of loneliness in a child who feels unloved. The manifestation of the night terrors is restrained but deeply effective and when the mother finally returns to offer comfort, there is no sudden unrealistic emotional connection. The simple act of her return to offer a little light while the child gets settled is enough to highlight the point of the piece and to show that love can exist even if it is not always obvious on the surface. Pessoa's visuals are wonderful, created by carving images into plaster. They summon up a nocturnal world of uncertainty with great beauty and unease.

DIR: John Weldon

SUMMARY: Frank is an intelligent rabbit who lives among his feeble-minded kind and has differentiated himself by dubbing himself a 'wrabbit'. While trying to protect his field of carrots, Frank accidentally finds himself elevated to a religious icon.

WHY IT'S HERE: John Weldon's short satirical fable 'Frank the Wrabbit' is a wonderful example of the appropriation of a children's book style to get across an adult message. The story is beautifully told, as the cocky Frank goes from contented wrabbit to religious icon in just a few easy steps. Frank is portrayed as rather self-important and deluded but it is the human characters who manage to hang so much significance on Frank because of one small, easily explained event, who are Weldon's real targets. Although children may enjoy 'Frank the Wrabbit', it is by no means a children's film, as a few potentially upsetting moments testify. But ultimately, this is a short that can be enjoyed by everyone who is well-prepared for what they are getting. That the name John Weldon is attached should be ample warning for anyone who has sampled the dark delights of 'Special Delivery' or 'The Lump'.

DIR: Torill Kove

SUMMARY: A reminiscence about a grandmother who ironed shirts for the King of Norway.

WHY IT'S HERE: Canadian animator Torill Kove's debut effort 'My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts' is a real charmer. With a colourful, simple cartoon style and friendly, conversational narration, it tells the fun story of the filmmaker's grandmother, with many diversions and fanciful, unlikely touches. The style is perfect for the feel of the short and makes it one of the most agreeably sweet nominees of all time. To many this may seem like a comparatively no-frills film but the storybook simplicity of the artwork and the good-natured narration are irresistible and the fact that shorts like this are so rare in the 21st century makes it a nostalgic but paradoxically timeless treat.

DIR: Jerzy Kucia

SUMMARY: A morning routine and a journey from the city into the country is portrayed through detached, vague images and a cacophony of sound.

WHY IT'S HERE: Polish director Jerzy Kucia's 'Tuning the Instruments' is a mesmerising film which mixes mundane images of daily life with kaleidoscopic abstraction to evoke a sense of living in the world rather than just a visual representation of what daily life looks like. The title 'Tuning the Instruments' seems to refer to the cacophony of sound which floods the soundtrack, from crackling bursts of radio transmission and the putt-putt of an engine to the bursts of discordant music from an orchestra, but also to the human instrument; the preparation of the body and mind for the day ahead. As the journey progresses, the music becomes more harmonious, although an unnerving sense of discord never leaves, with lilting piano offset by a high-pitched screech. 'Tuning the Instruments' is a film to be experienced rather than just observed and it certainly becomes more fascinating and relatable the more you watch it. For those with this inclination, there are ample rewards to reap.

DIR: Michele Cournoyer

SUMMARY: An erotic dancer cannot escape the recurring image of a hat worn by a man who abused her as a child.

WHY IT'S HERE: Canadian animator Michele Cournoyer's 'The Hat' is a tough viewing experience that examines the long-lasting effect that child abuse can have on a human mind. Beginning with the image of a woman's exposed breasts, the camera then pans up to her sad, reflective eyes, taking us back in time to a representation of her ordeal at the hands of a man whose face is constantly hidden beneath a hat. The hat becomes a recurring motif, brilliant transformed into various shapes, most memorably a young girl's dress. Cournoyer does not shy away from her subject and extremely graphic sexual imagery occurs throughout. Large, menacing penises bisect the screen, tongues probe exposed vaginas. Yet this is no sophomoric exploration of sexuality and few could find any kind of titillation or juvenile smirk-fodder in such exquisitely disturbing imagery. There is nothing coy, ambiguous or offensive in 'The Hat' but it is not an experience to enter into lightly.

DIR: Michael Dudok de Wit

SUMMARY: A father says goodbye to his beloved daughter before departing on a boat. Seasons change and the daughter gets older but she never loses her longing for her father.

WHY IT'S HERE: Michael Dudok de Wit's extraordinarily moving 'Father and Daughter' quickly became one of the most famous and acclaimed shorts in animation history, winning both the BAFTA and Oscar for best animated short. It is not hard to see why, for even as the narrative is vague, the depth of emotion displayed in this disarming piece is unbelievable. The story charts the departing of a father and a young girl's growth into a woman as she continually returns to the place where he left her to wait for his return. Whether the leaving of the father was symbolic or real is never confirmed, neither is their eventual reunion definitively real, imaginary or spiritual. The details are kept deliberately ambiguous and, as a result, 'Father and Daughter' is touching to different people for different reasons. The beautiful depiction of the changing landscape of the Netherlands is rendered in browns, greys and sepias and though a melancholia hangs heavy, 'Father and Daughter' is never depressing. The deeper themes that de Wit explored in 'The Monk and the Fish' are expanded upon with great subtlety here but the humour of that short is gone, replaced with a dramatic poignancy that easily rivals the most moving live action films. de Wit confirmed himself as a new master of the medium with this masterpiece and walked away with an armful of awards.

DIR: Don Hertzfeldt

SUMMARY: An animator having a mental breakdown creates a series of increasingly bizarre advertisements.

WHY IT'S HERE: Don Hertzfeldt's anarchic and riotously funny masterpiece 'Rejected' is a glimpse into the psyche of an animator who is having a breakdown. 'Rejected' consists of a series of advertisements the animator supposedly submitted to various companies who commissioned him. These adverts are increasingly surreal, disturbing and violent and never, ever anything to do with the product they are supposed to be pushing. It's a great idea handled perfectly and 'Rejected' quickly became a huge cult success on the internet. Previous Hertzfeldt films had hinted at the inventiveness on show in 'Rejected' but it remains a massively important leap forward for the filmmaker, particularly the incredibly effective last sequence in which the cartoon world begins to collapse in on itself and the entire cast of characters panic and attempt to break out of the animation. It would have been wonderful to see this Oscar nominated short win the award but it is worth celebrating the fact that such a strange piece got nominated at all. It cemented Hertzfeldt's reputation as one of the finest animators working today.

DIR: Steffan Schaffler

SUMMARY: A wig maker in 18th century London isolates himself in his shop to avoid the effects of the Plague.

WHY IT'S HERE: Steffan Schaffler's 'The Periwig-Maker', based on Daniel Defoe's novel 'A Journal of the Plague Years', is an astonishingly dark and beautifully made stop motion puppet animation. Schaffler worked alongside his sister Annette, who wrote and produced the short, for five years to create the film's exquisitely intricate sets and expressive puppets. The material may at first seem a little static to be a natural choice for animation, as the wig maker records his thoughts and observations on the Plague from his self-imposed isolation. However, the film is filled with brilliant little moments glimpsed through windows and enhanced by the eerie combination of lifelessness and haunted emotion that can only be captured so effectively in stop-motion puppets. As the voice of the wig maker, Kenneth Brannagh is a perfect choice and he recites the dialogue with a detached but spookily alluring eloquence. Elements of the supernatural begin to invade the story in its later stages but there is an ambiguity that suggests that these are in fact the result of a mind addled by encroaching madness or disease. Certainly the haunting final image suggests a man who is no longer in control of his senses and whose actions may well have been his downfall. Much is left to the imagination in 'The Periwig-Maker' and yet visually it is so brilliantly detailed that the viewer can drink in the superb rendering of 18th century London even as they wrestle with the ambiguous story that takes place there.

DIR: Ralph Eggleston

SUMMARY: A large, ugly bird attempts to make friends with a group of snobby smaller birds but their rejection of him leads to a surprising comeuppance.

WHY IT'S HERE: The wonderful 'Geri's Game' reignited interest in Pixar's short films and from thereon in their film releases were accompanied by a short film before the main feature. Ralph Eggleston's three and a half minute 'For the Birds' is one of the shortest and also one of the most enduringly popular shorts the studio ever released. A funny little morality tale with a satisfying slapstick punchline, I've never quite understood the extent of praise 'For the Birds' gets but while it is far from a work of genius, it is an appealingly simple piece which was instrumental in ensuring the continuation of a flow of Pixar shorts in its wake. This alone marks it out as a very important work and this combination of frivolity and historical significance somehow makes it all the more appealing.

DIR: Tim Burton

SUMMARY: A superhero with the power to spread dark stains is employed by the police to deal with social outcasts who are a nuisance to the public.

WHY IT'S HERE: 'The World of Stainboy' is a series of six short Flash animations written and directed by Tim Burton which appeared online in 2000. Based around characters from his 1997 poetry book 'The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories', 'The World of Stainboy' follows the adventures of a gormless but effective superhero who is pressed into action by bullying police chief Glen Dale to deal with social outcasts in the Burbank area. Although they sometimes commit criminal or disruptive acts, in other cases the 'bad guys' seem to have committed no wrongdoing and are just punished for being different, something which Sgt. Dale cannot tolerate. Stainboy himself is also a freak of nature but the police have harnessed this for their use, even though Stainboy is still treated with disdain (should that be de-stain?!). Although fairly trivial in content, the Stainboy shorts showed an encouraging inclination towards dark satire which was disappearing from Burton's increasingly predictable oeuvre. 'The World of Stainboy' shows Burton at his most charmingly innovative, seizing upon the relatively new medium of Flash animation to create something truly unusual. It's fair to say that the series showed signs of running out of steam by about the fourth episode, with episode five running a scant two minutes and the final episode breaking from the format to tell a Stainboy origin story instead. Although he stopped the series at the right time, Burton obviously has an affection for Stainboy, returning to him for a Twitter story-writing competition in 2010.

DIR: Adam Elliot

SUMMARY: Adam Elliot's memories of his older brother.

WHY IT'S HERE: The final film in Adam Elliot's trilogy of family films which began with 'Uncle' and 'Cousin', 'Brother' is Elliot's most autobiographical short and he has stated on many occasions that this is the case. As with 'Uncle' and 'Cousin', 'Brother' is humorous but dark, mixing childhood reminiscences with exploration of themes such as illness, alcoholism, bullying and death. Of the three family films, 'Brother' is the darkest and most tragic but Elliot taps in once more to a vein of joy in remembering his relationship with his brother and in many ways this is also the warmest film of the trilogy in its depiction of a close friendship between siblings. Elliot's family trilogy clearly marked him out as a talent to watch and his subsequent work has been universally critically acclaimed.

DIR: Jonathan Hodgson

SUMMARY: A group of young boys are fascinated by a house that their parents have forbidden them to go near and the man who lives inside it, whom they see only once.

WHY IT'S HERE: British animator Jonathan Hodgson's superb adaptation of a Charles Bukowski poem, 'The Man with the Beautiful Eyes' uses the designs of illustrator Jonny Hannah to capture the viewpoint of childhood. Bukowski's poem is superb, showing how the perspectives of adults and children differ and tapping into greater truths through the element of wisdom contained within youthful naivety. Hannah's illustrations are wonderful, combining the unusual colour scheme of a child's drawing with a muted palette that suggests darker implications. The visuals retain all the subtle ambiguity of Bukowski's words, without attempting to elaborate on a perfect poem. 'The Man with the Beautiful Eyes' is a perfectly restrained, psychologically taut and artistically incisive piece of work to cherish.

DIR: Jose Miguel Ribeiro

SUMMARY: A passenger on a train begins to suspect he is sharing the carriage with a wanted murderer.

WHY IT'S HERE: Portuguese animator Jose Miguel Ribeiro's 'The Suspect' is an absolutely brilliant stop motion short which presents a humorous suspense mystery in the space of 25 minutes. The film features a quartet of mismatched travelling companions in a train carriage: an uptight, antisocial man; a large, good-natured but clumsy woman; an attractive but snobbish lady and a rough and ready drifter. Spotting an article in his newspaper that seems to incriminate the drifter, the anti-social man attempts to investigate and alert his travelling companions without arousing suspicion. With great sets and wonderful characters, Ribeiro has created a genuinely gripping comedy that was highly acclaimed in Portugal but which is surprisingly little known outside of its native country.

DIR: Bill Plympton

SUMMARY: An extreme version of 'Candid Camera' in which the victims more often than not end up mutilated in some way.

WHY IT'S HERE: Bill Plmypton's 'Surprise Cinema' sees Plympton find yet another way to get laughs out of a series of gorily violent events. In this case, he inserts the various mutilations into a 'Candid Camera' style prank show, in which toilets are replaced with crocodiles, razors are replaced with chainsaws and (in a particularly funny moment) hand-dryers are replaced with jet engines. The prank show format allows Plympton to once again work in the black-out gags format and while it works well again, there is a slight sense of tiredness as well. 'Surprise Cinema' is very funny but feels like ground well-trodden as well. It is here as testament to Plympton's resourcefulness in being able to make similar concepts work again and again but also because it marks the moment when his sex and violence obsessed shorts of the mid-to-late 90s began to run out of steam. Fortunately, Plympton was canny enough to realise this and his 21st century shorts began to move away from this in favour of more interesting areas while also maintaining the Plymptonian sense of humour that makes his work so well-loved.

DIR: Andreas Hykade

SUMMARY: Two cowboys spend their days in the shelter of a large rock but at night they venture into the sexual bazaar of the town.

WHY IT'S HERE: German animator Andreas Hykade's unflinchingly sexual but visually wonderful 'Ring of Fire' is definitely not one to show the children! In many ways, the film feels like a throwback to 70s animation in which sex played a significant part. But 'Ring of Fire' is so much more than a series of sexual images or a tribute to a bygone era of animation. This astonishing Western morality play, rendered in stark black and white, is a surrealist, psychedelic feast for the eyes and mind, in which two cowboys are beset with visions of sexual intensity that overwhelm them in different ways. The aggressive, confident cowboy revels in it while his awkward, uncertain counterpart wanders the sexual desert unsure of how to behave. Hykade takes the ludicrous Western genre cliché of women as either saints or whores as a central theme, although one of 'Ring of Fire's weaknesses is the impossibility to tell whether he is subverting or perpetuating this narrative tradition. The despoiling of a women whose purity is symbolised by her literally flowing hair is central to the story, as is the bordello of a woman dressed in black who will let in any cowboy who can shoot a hole through a coin. There's a troubling tendency to define the women by how the men perceive and treat them, although the film can be seen as a fever dream entirely from the point of view of men (or even one man, if we see the two cowboys as elements of the same character) and therefore this would be consistent with the story. Any ideological problems aside, 'Ring of Fire' is a visually brilliant piece filled with graphical sexual images on which many different meaning can be hung. Hykade establishes himself as an animator of great talent, although his ambiguous storytelling, like the cowboys in his film, only seems occasionally confident and not always commendable.

DIR: Sion Jones, Joe Turner, Michael Mort

SUMMARY: The Gogs, a family of cavepeople, are forced to move on from their home when it is destroyed by a T-Rex.

WHY IT'S HERE: 'Gogs' was a British series of short animations which followed the adventures of a group of ill-mannered cavepeople. The show ran for two series in the mid-90s, with episodes lasting about 5 minutes a piece. Although the series featured great animation, with the Claymation Gogs communicating mainly through body language as well as a series of grunts, groans, belches and farts, nothing in the original series suggested that these characters could sustain a half-hour special. Fortunately, though it retains its crude charms, 'Gogwana', the half-hour special made to complete the 'Gogs' saga, has a higher budget and better story than the very short animations that preceded it. The prehistoric environment is greatly enhanced here with more details and more inhabitants, including various dinosaurs and a tribe of threatening pygmy cannibals who act as the main antagonists. Amongst the bodily function gags there are great genre references and a genuine storyline which makes the most of the Gogs dysfunctional but touching family dynamic. Although it is fondly remembered by many, I was never a massive fan of the 'Gogs' series but 'Gogwana' provides a great ending to a saga that was sadly over just as it seemed to be getting off the ground.

DIR: Suzie Templeton

SUMMARY: A pensioner trapped in a loveless marriage finds joy in a giant cabbage he is growing in his walled garden.

WHY IT'S HERE: British animator Suzie Templeton's debut stop motion short 'Stanley' is a terrific oddity which really captures the loneliness and misery of being trapped in the tiny world of a loveless marriage and a small house. Stanley, a good-natured man, avoids his brutal, meat-obsessed wife by spending time in the garden with the giant cabbage he is growing, the one sign of plant life amongst the desolate bricks and paving. The extent of Stanley's love for the cabbage is seen when he begins to have sexual dreams about bathing it and when his wife begins to resent the cabbage, she switches her focus from exclusively meat-based dishes to meat and veg. 'Stanley' has a absurdist streak of dark humour running through it but is, at its core, deadly serious and each apparently daft plot element is actually a symbol for a greater theme of loneliness, resentment and fear. Templeton's craggy puppets are both grotesque exaggerations and tremendously lifelike. Witness the genuinely moving moment of Stanley weeping over his cabbage.

DIR: Phil Mulloy

SUMMARY: Human beings discover a film from the planet Zog which depicts customs of its inhabitants. Though fairly similar to human beings, the zogs happen to have their heads and sexual organs in the opposite place to humans.

WHY IT'S HERE: 'Intolerance', the first in Phil Mulloy's trilogy on the subject, is an unsubtle but effective look at mankind's inability to tolerate anything different from what they know. This is explored through the discovery of a film from the planet Zog which reveals its inhabitants have penises and vaginas for heads and heads between their legs. For the most part, the film is a scientific lecture on the customs of the zog people, which includes some wince-inducing images of them shaving and eating! However, as the lecture progresses the audience become more disturbed and arbitrarily angry, with a self-appointed leader finally beginning a march on the projection room and demanding all-out war be waged on these beings who dare to have sexual organs in the wrong place. The cliff-hanger ending reveals, inevitably, that the planet Zog has also got their hands on a film from Earth and are currently planning the exact same thing. After the more complex 'Wind of Changes' and 'The Chain', 'Intolerance' finds Mulloy back on familiarly extreme comedy territory, using sexual images to make his humanistic point. In the process, he not only questions our species' intolerance towards harmless differences but also challenges the notion that sexual imagery is inherently offensive, with human ideas of penetrative sex being regarded by zogs as a simple greeting.

DIR: Tim Webb

SUMMARY: When John falls to his death out of the window of a suburban house, we see several different characters' viewpoints of how this event came about.

WHY IT'S HERE: Tim Webb's 'Six of One' is an enjoyable domestic drama played out from multiple narratives in tribute to Akira Kurosawa's 'Rashomon'. 'Six of One' deliberately takes all the most clichéd elements of soap opera style drama: the deceitful husband, the unfulfilled wife, the mysterious old flame, the promiscuous secretary. The affair between the husband and secretary is even covered up with that old chestnut, the squash game! In using these well worn plot points, Webb comments on both the perspectives of different people and the repetitive nature of the media's portrayal of matrimonial deceit. 'Six of One' is undoubtedly flawed, in that its twelve minutes are not enough to give us a decent look at everyone's viewpoint. For instance, a very funny film noir style narration from the corpse of John is barely given a minute of screen time to develop. Despite its shortcoming however, 'Six of One' leaves us with a memorable image that, depending on your own viewpoint, either cynically implies that sordid infidelity is going on everywhere or merely rolls its eyes at the repetitive depiction of these hackneyed tales of adulterous treachery.

DIR: Paul Driessen

SUMMARY: A young boy's real and fantasy life are depicted in split screen. He mostly fantasises scenarios of peril while in dull everyday situations. But the two worlds start to merge when real peril appears on the horizon.

WHY IT'S HERE: Paul Driessen's 'The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg' is a terrific and deceptively sweet film that suddenly becomes tragic at the end. As with his previous 'The End of the World in Four Seasons', Driessen again works in split screen, requiring the audience to pay careful attention to two separate scenarios. In the left hand panel, we see the real life of a young boy as he goes about his mundane daily routine, while on the right hand side we see him fantasising himself into adventure stories, as the victim of various dangerous situations. He is persistently roused from these fantasies by the interruptions of adults and has to begin again with new ones. 'The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg' handles its scenario brilliantly and for the most part is a sweet and funny film. However, its final section pushes it into the realms of greatness as we realise that the boy is a passenger on the Titanic. Although he sees the danger coming, his warnings are disregarded by adults and, of course, the ship crashes into the iceberg. The film's closing scenes which depict the boy's final moments of consciousness are remarkable and resoundingly sad.

DIR: Tom Schroeder

SUMMARY: A monologue about a boy riding 50 miles on his bike to see his girlfriend, only to get dumped.

WHY IT'S HERE: Tom Schroeder's 'Bike Ride' is an absolutely riveting short in which a young man tells a story about a 50 mile bike ride he went on to see his long-distance girlfriend. Accompanied by a jazz drum soundtrack by Dave King, James Peterson's narration from his own story is extraordinarily real. You feel like you're having a drink with a friend who is offloading his troubles. Although Peterson is not overtly emotional, the underlying feelings of exhilaration, expectation, disappointment and exhaustion all come out through both his words and Schroeder's brilliantly simple animation, which consists of simple white line drawings on a black background which fluidly transform into shapes to compliment the story. It's rare that I feel as completely emotionally engaged with a short film as I did with 'Bike Ride' and this is testament to the brilliance of both Peterson and Schroeder who bring the story to life with apparent simplicity but with a real emotional depth beneath the nonchalant surface.