The Quinta’s Ghost is an animated horror short that dramatizes the twilight years of Francisco Goya, as he paints his Black Paintings in his house, the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man). In a novel twist, the story is narrated from the point of view of the Quinta itself, responding to what Goya paints on its walls. The short, done in computer animation, brings the demons and other nightmarish imagery of Goya’s work to life, incorporating state-of-the-art techniques such as VR painting. It’s a hellish depiction of an artist suffering through grief, madness, and issues of identity.

Chile has had some top-notch adult animation, especially in the horror genre, but Petra and the Sun is better filed under morbid humor, and it was an especially effective example of it too. In the Andes, 71-year-old Petra lives a lonely life until hotter-than-usual weather reveals the frozen body of a century-old mountaineer. Petra takes the body home, thaws it, and spends some uncomfortably in-depth quality time with his preserved corpse…the disappearance of which the police are aware of. Despite its premise, this was one of the funniest films they showed, though it’s definitely not for the squeamish. I felt that the ending could’ve been handled better, but overall, this one I really enjoyed. This short also won a Special Jury Mention.

How is River is Born was definitely one of the more mature shorts in the set. A woman has a sensual experience with what appears to be a nature goddess, but ultimately ends up being something less yet significantly more. This one’s pretty simple in terms of story, and is mostly carried by the beautiful animation.

Ovary-Acting is a comedy short about a 34-year-old woman who is pressured by her family and motherly friends to have children. As the stress gets to her, she unexpectedly gives birth her talking ovaries, leading to a musical argument about the pros and cons of motherhood. The animation style, which uses knit puppets with 2D-animated mouths, brings to mind something out of an R-rated version of KaBlam! This was definitely a fun one to watch, and it has a great sense of humor and heart to it.

Still Moving follows a divorced mother having a stressful car ride with her daughter as they head to their new home. The strength of this short is in the animation, which is probably one of the best depictions of anxiety I’ve seen in recent memory. It’s really experimental, though it definitely seems to be the main focus of the short over the story.

A Night at the Rest Area is an anime short in which a group of anthropomorphic animals on a bus stop at a rest area. There’s really not much to say about this one in terms of story. However, what it lacks in plot it makes up for with gentle yet effective comedy about everyday life. There’s a real appreciation of the mundane, where even the jingle playing as the nearby vending machine heats up your meal is given focus. Obviously, the use of animals adds to a lot of the humor, and the sketchy character designs are great. One of my favorite jokes in this involves a convenience store employee who is anything but convenient, and the punchline being obvious doesn’t make it any less funny (or relatable). This one doesn’t have much but in a way it also has a lot.

The Piano is a hand-drawn short in which a young girl discovers her father playing the piano late at night, creating a bond that lasts into adulthood. The animation is amazing, the music is beautiful, and the ending will warm your heart, if not open the tear ducts. It’s another short with a simple idea done extremely well.

As mentioned before, Best Animated Short went to Playing God, which I definitely feel could’ve fit into either of the shorts programs. This also qualifies it for the Oscars, and I guess I’ll find out if it gets nominated (though the short that won Sundance might be tough competition). Hopefully I’ll get to see it at some point, but overall, the 14 shorts I saw (if we’re only counting the competition) were for the most part highly enjoyable and I loved a lot of the styles used.

Tribeca, while certainly a star-studded affair, typically features films that don’t receive as much of the prestige attention awarded to the output of festivals like Sundance or Cannes. I’m come to accept that, but there are occasionally exceptions. There are always animated shorts, but year’s event comes off of a major achievement for the festival, in that the film awarded Best Animated Short last year, In the Shadow of the Cypress, eventually found it’s way to the stage at this year’s Academy Awards after winning for Best Animated Short there as well. (I don’t think that Tribeca was the reason for the short getting Oscar-qualified, but it was one of them.) Clearly motivated by this, Tribeca programmers not only featured the biggest short film selection yet, but an animated shorts program twice as large as previous years. Not one, but two programs of shorts were needed to fill the space of the selections this year, split into family-friendly and adult-oriented sets. Yet as I learned, that apparently still wasn’t enough. This year’s Best Animated Short winner went to Playing God, a short that was in competition but not included in the two shorts programs and put in the Midnight-themed shorts instead. Unfortunately, I was unable to see it, though I did hear good things. (I do believe that Playing God could’ve easily been included in the shorts blocks, but that’s another tangent.) Anyway, here are the short films that I did get to see, starting with the family-friendly offerings:

Linie 12 follows a conductor on a surreal train journey, whose rhythmic precision is interrupted by the arrival of a chaotic musician. I liked the scruffy linework in this a lot and the imagery in this is absolutely beautiful at times.

From Aardman Academy comes Awaiting the Lightning Bolt. Told in stop motion, an inventor tries multiple times to capture lightning, but his comic attempts hide a more heartwarming purpose. This one’s short, sweet, and really funny.

Actor Kate Siegel is mainly known for her work in horror. The short she directed, Lily, is a more family friendly take on the genre, even with the fact that it was written by Stephen King. Told in scratchy, Edward Gorey-esque pencil art, a young boy needs to go to the bathroom but is embarrassed in front of the class by his sadistic teacher. When he finally gets there, he makes a frightening discovery. I absolutely loved the animation for this, and the story is really fun.

Captain Zero: Into the Abyss Part II follows a superhero who, after losing a battle against a villain, finds himself on the receiving end of social media backlash and the taunts of a depression demon (expertly voiced by Keith David), ultimately finding himself in therapy. The anime-styled animation is superb, and I always enjoy genre fiction about mental health. It’s pretty clear this is intended to be a pilot for a series of sorts (in addition to being the second installment, it ends on a cliffhanger), and I hope the filmmaker finds the means of making more. Another thing I liked was his use of worn VHS as a visual aesthetic.

Ostrich takes an avian look at social media body image. A pudgy bird goes through extreme measures to be like the ostrich pop star plastered over the media. I liked the art style for this, which felt like something out of Adult Swim, and while the ending was pretty obvious the punchline was genuinely funny.

Tigre is, according to the festival site, “the animated story of a friend’s grandfather, a refugee from Laos, living in Thailand,” and “a narrative full of uncertainty and curiosity, where a young man who goes deep into the jungle without understanding that not everything is as it seems.” I liked the animation style, which is seemingly modeled after shadow puppetry, but to be honest I genuinely had no idea what was going on in this short. Maybe I needed more context.

Finally, the environmental-themed short Snow Bear follows a lonely polar bear who, unable to find others like him, builds a snowbear to spend time with. Unfortunately, it can’t stay cold forever. The short is directed by Aaron Blaise, a veteran animator who did the character animation for the Beast in Beauty and the Beast and directed Brother Bear among working in other Disney projects, so it’s no surprise that this has the best animation of the entire set. What is surprising is that Aaron apparently animated this himself, while still looking like the professional-grade work he did for the House of Mouse. (I asked him how long it took to make the film after, and he said three years, which is still less than I expected.) This was a beautiful short that will warm your heart.

In my next article, I’ll spotlight the adult animated offerings at the festival.

I’ve seen a lot of animated documentaries that use the medium to tackle sensitive subject matter in ways that make the material more digestible and profound, but Endless Cookie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, might be the farthest, and funniest, approach to this. The entire movie renders its subjects in a hyper-surrealist style that mixes flashy colors and crass humor, with many of the participants being portrayed as anthropomorphized objects. The film, a combination of vignettes mixing illustrated recorded accounts and scripted scenes, initially appears like the sort of thing that would get its directors hired by the likes of Adult Swim. Yet it’s right after you get accustomed to it that the film plays its true hand. Beneath its hangout-comedy vibe is a devastating look at the experience facing Canada’s indigenous population.

Seth Scriver has just received a grant from Canada’s prestigious “N.F.G.” to make a documentary about his half-brother Pete (with whom he decides to share directorial credit with). Seth is white but Pete is indigenous, and lives on a reservation so inaccessible that Seth can’t even visit without flying. The idea is that Pete will tell seven stories about life growing up as an indigenous person in the 1970s and 80s, in ways that are both funny and poignant, and Seth will animate over them. All he has to do is deliver the movie in seven months, the kind of goal you get when the money people don’t understand how feature animation works. Also, Seth and Peter get sidetracked. A lot.

Through a mix of stories and satirical sketches, the Scrivers paint a hilarious portrait of late twentieth century Canada. Fans of stoner/hangout comedies and cartoons like Regular Show will find a lot to love about this film’s plot threads, from Pete’s buddies stealing chickens off delivery trucks, to pressing their luck with the local pizza place’s “30 minutes or less” policy (with the restaurant eventually getting back at them in an extremely funny way). This is a film that often doesn’t take itself seriously, and it’s not afraid to veer off course. It’s freewheeling and goes where it feels like. (A small story about an animal trap takes up almost the entire runtime of the film to tell.) This also extends to the warts-and-all nature of what Seth decides to show. A lot of the early moments in the film are dedicated to trying to get clean audio, and a recurring bit involves the N.F.G. representative, portrayed as a slide ruler, repeatedly questioning Seth’s direction for the movie (as a progressively-smaller pile of money burns off to the side).

Of course, it’s not all fun and free pizza, and the movie isn’t only interested in fooling around. This is still a documentary about the indigenous experience in Canada, with recollections of police profiling, land grabs, and the specter of residential schools haunting even the most amusing of stories. Yet the film also finds way to mix its absurdist sense of humor into the proceedings. A fictional show called “Canadian Idle” shows Canadians being so passive upon hearing about indigenous incarceration rates and the factors contributing to them that they are rendered as car seats. The lawyer representing a wrongfully convicted indigenous youth is a literal snake. Police are caricatured as babbling cowards and, in probably one of the most unexpected political sequences I have ever seen in a documentary, a segment mixes the scars of colonization with a famous video game meme and a very cathartic parody of 90s first-person shooters. The tonal shifts sometimes get iffy, but for the most part, it works. There’s also a lot of great stories about Peter’s family and heritage, such his mom making snacks out of dried caribou stomach that, while he looks back on them as a fond memory of his family’s culture, he will admit smelled and tasted awful.

The animation work in this is hysterical, and really adds to the film’s tone. As mentioned, a lot of the film’s subjects are rendered as objects, such as talking socks, soda cans, and vegetables, and I loved seeing where the art style would go next. (Sometimes, actual objects end up talking too.) There’s also a ton of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it in-jokes and nods to Canadian/indigenous history sprinkled throughout for eagle-eyed viewers. Expanding the capabilities of documentary storytelling in extremely entertaining while still thought-provoking ways, it’s both a tribute to Canada’s native peoples and a good history lesson for those not in the know. I’ll be thinking about this movie for a while, and hopefully someone will pick it up so others can see it too.

Hollywood’s biggest night is on Sunday, coming off of an absolute rollercoaster of an award season. We’re only now getting a clear frontrunner with Anora, Emilia Perez has gone from social media pariah to social media pariah that may actually lose now, and multiple nominee surprises have shaken up people’s predictions, including my own. The Substance may end up being the most deranged movie to gain major Oscar attention and/or wins since Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Walter Salles’ incredible drama I’m Still Here beat the odds to gain a Best Picture nomination that, in my opinion, it deserves to win. As always, though, you have likely already heard all this, which is why I like talking about the stuff that you probably haven’t, like the shorts. As is usually the case, there were a lot of good shorts this year, some great, some okay, and at least one where I’m questioning who’s even voting for these. At the very least, I’m highlighting the animated ones.

The animated shorts in particular included an especially disappointing snub with Don Hertzfeldt’s ME, which did make the shortlist but not the nominees, dashing my hopes that the Academy will give him at least one well-deserved Oscar. While I like to say that the animated Oscar shorts are where anything is possible, it was particularly more true this year than last year. Many of the films featured take full advantage of the medium, and even the shorts with the heaviest subject matter convey it in ways that live action simply can’t. Here are the nominees for Best Animated Short film.

Beautiful Men tells the story of three bald brothers who have traveled to Istanbul for a hair transplant. However, a misunderstanding results in only one of them actually getting the opportunity, and it isn’t long before insecurities and conflicts boil to the surface. I typically love watching the Oscar-nominated animated shorts for films like this, and to see them get wider exposure (even if the presence of animated drama for adult audiences still results in the Academy treating it like a disposable medium for kids). This short, however, is severely lacking. The stop-motion animation and puppet designs are great, and there are some amusing moments, but really, there’s not much here. In addition, the ending felt really rushed, as if the filmmakers didn’t know how to conclude the piece. I have heard people predict this short will win (mainly on GoldDerby). Last year, the Academy went for the weakest choice with War is Over!, but at least the politics at the time justified why they would pick it. Here, I really don’t see anything that leads me to believe that this has a chance, and while I support animation like this, I will be disappointed if it wins.

In the Shadow of the Cypress I already covered last year when it played at the Tribeca Film Festival, during which it won the award for Best Animated Short. That win qualified it for this year’s Oscars, where it’s currently nominated. A dialogue-free short from Iran, it’s about a former captain living in a house by the sea, whose PTSD strains his relationship with his daughter. My thoughts on this haven’t changed much since Tribeca. This short does a great job using animation to express difficult themes, and I loved how much surrealism was present. In terms of the five, I’d say that this is definitely one of the better nominees.

Daisuke Nishio has had a notable career in anime, directing a good amount of the Dragon Ball franchise among other things. His short film Magic Candies is an absolute delight and is, in my opinion, a strong frontrunner. The short is about Dong-Dong, a lonely boy who plays with marbles. He goes to buy some new ones, but what he thinks are marbles turn out to be candies. Not just any candies, either. After eating one, the sofa starts talking. Dong-Dong figures out how the candies work and soon gains a new perspective on life. Heartfelt and extremely funny, this was a joy to watch. It’s animated in CGI at a low-frame rate, essentially using 2D anime production techniques in a 3D environment, but what it lacks in fluidity it makes up for with extremely detailed art design. Honestly, I went into this thinking it was stop-motion because the CGI was so good. One of my favorite jokes it this is the use of onscreen text exclamations. While common in anime and manga, the use of it in a 3D setting I found incredibly humorous and inventive. I’d say of the five shorts, this was one of my favorites, and I’d put it as my pick for the winner. Of particular note is the fact that the film qualified for the Oscars for winning the Grand Jury Prize after premiering at the New York International Children’s Film Festival. The festival is one of the best places to watch international and independent animation in New York City, and I hope to cover this year’s festival soon.

I feel like dark takes on children’s’ television is a bit of an overused premise (Pib and Pog is one of my favorite examples), but Wander to Wonder takes it in a direction I genuinely did not expect. In the 1980’s, Wander to Wonder was a beloved kids’ TV staple, in which a friendly live-action host and three friendly stop-motion monsters teach children educational lessons. That is, until the creator and host died an untimely death (we don’t find out how, but whatever happened, nobody has removed his body). Now his three animated co-stars, amusingly revealed to be further stop-motion puppets wearing monster costumes, are alone, running out of food, and making increasingly desperate episodes for an audience that may or may not be there. This is honestly one of the darkest, bleakest animated shorts I’ve seen the Oscars nominate, and as a creative, it really hit me hard. As a mediation on how creations take on lives on their own (or if you just have an overactive imagination and think this) it’s absolutely devastating, even as I’d call some of it darkly comic. I can’t for certain say that this really deserves to win, but it definitely left an impact on me.

Childhood views on romance is the subject of Yuck!, a French short that I know ran quite a bit of the festival circuit. A group of kids view in disgust as they see adults kissing (some claim to have even seen them “doing it”), but it isn’t long before one boy finds himself attracted to a girl, and wanting to kiss himself. I’ve definitely seen this topic explored before, and this was a particularly cute example. I appreciated how the characters’ lips glow when they’re in love. Overall, though, I don’t see this as much of a contender as some of the other ones. It was definitely a fun watch, however.

As for the animated features, this was a particularly strong year. My pick is The Wild Robot, but overall I’d say they’re all worth watching. Even the weakest nominee, Inside Out 2, still had one of the best depictions of mental health issues I’ve seen in animation. There’s been talk that Flow could end up taking home the big prize which, if that were to happen, would be notable in that a low-budget dialogue-free film made in Blender would beat out several other productions with much higher production values. Anyway, we’ll see who ends up winning on Sunday. (Although if they make another crack about these movies being for children the year Memoir of a Snail is nominated, I swear to God…)

The Sundance Film Festival is often the place to find the next great work of cinema, and since the pandemic, they’ve been allowing people at home to watch as well. This year, the festival selected thirteen animated shorts and one feature, Endless Cookie (which I’ll hopefully review at a later date). I unfortunately wasn’t able to watch all of them, as one short, Caries, was not available virtually. However, I did watch the rest, and I thought I’d share my picks of my favorite ones, along with an additional short that made great use of animation as well.

Paradise Man (ii) is honestly less an animated film than an inventive animated collage movie, but it was one of my favorite things I saw in the animated short film program regardless. It’s made almost entirely with repurposed images and GIFs of those white, big-headed, blank, faceless figures you find in stock media, but in the hands of Jordan Michael Blake, these nondescript cartoons take on new emotional resonance. Subtitled “Episode 1: Golf”, the short is an extended monologue by the titular Paradise Man, who initially starts out discussing his pursuit of getting a hole in one before a family tragedy causes him to reflect on his own existence and purpose. With the stock-based format and Paradise Man’s narration being supplied by a slowed-down automated voice, it initially comes across like something you’d find in the early morning on Adult Swim before hitting you with genuine and relatable poignancy. (Sundance also pointed out that Blake had previously been commissioned by Adult Swim to make a segment of their incredible anthology series Off the Air.) The short ends with the promise of a second episode, and I’m hoping Blake makes good on it. You’ll never look at stock graphics the same way again.

Arguably one of the best shorts, and the one that won the Grand Jury Prize for Animated Short Films, was As If the Earth Had Swallowed Them Up (Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado). It tells of a woman who returns to her home of Mexico City, where she looks back on how, as a young girl, she came to terms with what happens to women in Mexico. The short’s endearing art style gives way to some truly harrowing sequences illustrating its serious subject matter, and I thought it was a great example of how animation can both make dark topics more accessible while at the same time enhancing their impact. It definitely deserved the top prize, which qualifies it for next year’s Oscars.

There were a few other shorts of note that I enjoyed. Hurikán, described as a “deep-fried romance from Prague”, follows the literally pigheaded titular character as he offers to resupply a beer stand where he has a crush on the bartender, only to find himself on the beer run from Hell. Gritty, darkly comic, and with great music, it brings to mind something out of the alternative animation of the 1990s when the film is set. Bunnyhood is a punky short from the UK that feels like a zine comic come to life. In it, Bobby learns that her mother may not always be telling the truth when a promised fast food dinner ends up being a trip to the hospital. The whole short is gleefully surreal and anarchic but not to the extent to where you can’t figure things out. Told in a crude but endearingly handcrafted animation style, this was one of my favorite watches of the selections this year. View from the Floor is a 5 minute piece in which Mindie Lind, a singer without legs, discusses her brief brush with fame, where she discovers that it wasn’t so much about her talent as it was about “inspiration porn.” A thought-provoking and funny take on how disability is perceived in the media, it’s a decent piece in its own. However, the short is actually a proof-of-concept for a feature length animated documentary of the same title, and that’s something I really hope gets off the ground because based on this, I’d love to see more.

Also, while not really an animated short, I nevertheless feel compelled to bring up a title from the documentary short film selections that uses animation in a great way. Three Sundances ago, Joe Hunting’s documentary We Met in Virtual Reality not only introduced me to the world of VRChat, but expanded my idea of what documentaries could be. Now, he’s back with The Reality of Hope, a live-action/machinima documentary short that presents a truly moving story of how fantastical virtual communities can inspire very real impact. Hiyu is a prominent member of VRChat’s Furality community, an organization of furry artists and creators, until his real life unexpectedly intrudes in the worst possible way: his kidneys are failing. Photographotter, another member, agrees to donate his kidney and fly from New York to Stockholm to save Hiyu’s life. Whereas We Met in Virtual Reality was filmed entirely within VRChat, The Reality of Hope alternates between real and virtual environments, reminding us that there are actual people behind the cartoon animals we initially see as our subjects. It’s a touching reminder of the power of community, and a great documentary for the gaming crowd. The use of video game assets in documentaries has been a bit of a trend recently that I have been fascinated with, and I hope it continues, especially if we get more films such as this. I also suspect it’ll be streaming in the near future as Documentary+ was listed as one of the companies involved, so hopefully you’ll get to check it out for yourself.

The other animated selections were Flower Show, Inkwo For When the Starving Return, Luz Diabla, Field Recording, Jesus 2, The Eating of an Orange, and A Round of Applause for Death.

I’ve heard it and thought it several times now: Hollywood plays it too safe. The cost of making movies is so (almost certainly unnecessarily) high now that convention reigns and original or daring works are simply too risky. Unless a filmmaker has enough of a reputation that hearing their name alone will attract audiences, assuming that even holds true anymore (just ask Clint Eastwood), it’s unlikely we’ll see anything new. However, there are occasionally exceptions. If there’s a name that conjures up both beloved films and formal innovation, it’s Robert Zemeckis. While he’s certainly experimented with his last few movies through performance capture animation, his recent work has left a lot to be desired. His latest, Here, promises to be a return to form. Based on Richard McGuire’s acclaimed graphic novel of the same name, itself expanded from a groundbreaking 1989 comic in Raw, it aims to challenge cinematic convention while applying cutting-edge visual effects and telling a story that’s intimate while encompassing the enormity of time and the universal human experience. This is the sort of movie that tries to be unlike anything else, and it was one I was hotly anticipating. Having now seen it, I can tell you that they mostly failed and I’m extremely disappointed.

The story of Here is about a place and the people that inhabit it. The camera stays still but the scenery changes, starting during the age of the dinosaurs, and moving ahead to Native American peoples, colonial times, the 1800s, the entire 20th century, and the early 21st century to the present. A house is built, and a number of key players arrive to inhabit it. There’s an early airplane pilot and his wife and daughter. Then they’re replaced by an inventor and his wife, the former of whom may have stumbled on the perfect invention at the perfect time. However, once they leave, the primary focus of the story begins, as Al (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose buy the house after World War II and start a family. Later, one of their sons, Richard (Tom Hanks), meets Margaret (Robin Wright), who becomes his girlfriend. He later marries and has a daughter with her, Vanessa. From there, much of the film follows the trials and tribulations of the family throughout the ensuing decades, all against the backdrop of what occurred before them and what will happen after.

First of all, this gimmick isn’t new, and didn’t take long to wear off. Hell, I’d argue that Adult Swim did this better two years ago with their Yule Log special, and that was just because they could. However, I do applaud the effort in translating the comic’s art style to the screen. Essentially, rather than cutting between time periods, windows will show the location as it was in the past or future, much like the original source material, before fading in to the whole frame. This often creates some fun editing opportunities, but many other times it doesn’t work as well as I wanted it to. (Also there’s some really off-putting transitions that appear to be automated.) In addition, the narrative doesn’t live up to the editing flourishes. The story is non-linear, but often jumps around at random, even if to set up a point, and it initially made it hard for me to get invested in the characters as a result. Also, the single perspective occasionally leads to awkward cinematography. Characters will sometimes speak their lines directly into the camera or stand too close to it. It’s like watching a play except instead of seeing it on a theater stage, you’re just standing in a house and the actors are ignoring you as they’re performing.

Once the main story became apparent, I was at the very least engaged. I can’t hate Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in this. Because of the length of time required for the premise, Zemeckis uses real-time de-aging technology to make the two of them look younger, and for the most part, I thought it worked. Yet while I may be a sucker for sentimentality, there’s some decisions in this that feel a bit too on the nose, and at the end of the day, it’s a pretty standard slice-of-life story. While I found it enjoyable in the moment, it was only afterwards when I started thinking about the film that the flaws became clear. Since the story jumps around so much, it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of the timeline. There are clues in the background that let you know the historical vicinity of the events, but other times I was unsure if the main story was even in order. There is a bit of a central conflict, but, without spoiling things too much, portions of the movie even early on flash forward to when the conflict is clearly resolved. On top of that, most of the other characters in this movie aside from the main story are more or less irrelevant outside of the primary theme and gimmick, so there’s not much reason to care about them from a narrative perspective. Despite this, they get a lot of screen time.

While the ending certainly drives the point home and warms one’s heart, it also makes it obvious why I found this movie so disappointing: what is the point of it? Okay, that’s a bit harsh. It’s a slice of life drama about a single location through the enormity of time, mainly focusing on a single family across decades and highlighting major changes, historical recurrences, and human truths. That’s fine. Yet, I don’t think that’s what Zemeckis was going for. As a filmmaker, he’s known for trying to reinvent the wheel visually, having done so with films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump, and it’s obvious why he would be attracted to source material like this. The original comic was experimental with its use of panel art, and he clearly wanted to create something unlike anything anyone has done before. Here’s the problem though: People have done things like this before for thousands of years. It’s called theater. All he did was play around with the editing. As for the real-time de-aging technology, that’s certainly innovative, but it’s not going to carry a film. If you think about it, the story can basically be described as a family living in a house, after other people who lived after other people, before other people still, and in a location that changed massively over thousands of years. That’s certainly a premise with a lot of opportunity for interesting and mind-blowing storytelling, but Zemeckis didn’t seem to do that. However, a comic is different. It doesn’t move. It’s individual pictures that we can stare at for as long as we want, but we expect them to be sequential. Richard McGuire’s Here was actually innovative. It challenges the way we think about comic storytelling, in a way that only comics could do. It just doesn’t translate well enough as a movie.

In the end, Here is a perfectly normal story that really wants to be groundbreaking, as did I, but it simply isn’t. Comic book movies may be all the rage (for now), but some stories should just stay as still art. Incidentally, in the process of writing this review, I discovered a faithful 1991 student film adaptation of the original comic. You can watch it here. It does more in six minutes than Robert Zemeckis did in 104, is actually formally experimental, and drives the point home in the amount of time it takes for the gimmick to wear off.

For animation fans, Memoir of a Snail should be treated like an event. Australian animator Adam Elliot hasn’t done much, but what he has done has been widely acclaimed, and this also his first animation in 9 years as well as the follow-up to his 2009 feature debut Mary and Max. Keeping with his themes of social outcasts and autobiography, and featuring his signature mix of often blunt darkness with an endearingly offbeat sense of humor and art style, it thankfully lives up to the hype. While I don’t think it’s on par with his first feature, it more than avoids a sophomore slump. The film is narrated by Grace, a hoarder recounting her life story. As a child, she’s bullied for her appearance and enjoys collecting snails. Her only comfort is the bond she shares with her twin brother Gilbert, as well as her paraplegic father Percy, a former juggler and animator. When tragedy strikes, the two twins are separated. As Grace adjusts to her new life, she befriends an eccentric elderly woman named Pinky who always manages to find silver linings despite some unfortunate circumstances.

First thing’s first: if you haven’t seen an Adam Elliot animation before, be prepared. His stories are often unflinchingly bleak and deal with subjects like mental illness/disorders, marginalized people, and occasionally taboo subject matter. The fact that they’re always in some way shape or form autobiographical adds to their power. Even still, this is definitely one of the darker productions I’ve seen from him overall, though I don’t want to get into too much detail for the purpose of avoiding spoilers. Yet, like his other films, it’s also hilarious. Elliot has a gift for mixing bleakness with a humor style that’s eccentric, quirky, and absurd, and the tonal balance actually works really well.

Memoir of a Snail is rendered in Elliot’s trademark offbeat stop-motion style, which favors imperfect edges and shapes, and I still find it charming and unique. It’s sort of like watching an alternative comic come to life in three dimensions. In an age of CGI, it’s rare to see a movie where everything is lovingly hand-crafted. The voice acting is superb, with Jackie Weaver’s Pinky being a highlight. As Grace, Sarah Snook (Succession) nails the part, bringing the emotional weight of the character through her voice work. (For fans of Nick Cave, he also has a role.) As for any issues I had, there were parts of the story I definitely saw coming, and the ending I felt could’ve been handled a tad better, but I felt those were minor relative to the film overall.

Anyone who has ever felt detached from those around them will likely be put through the emotional wringer by the end of Memoir of a Snail, and while Elliot’s prior work has gotten accolades, it’s only recently that I believe adult animation has really caught up with what he’s doing. Hopefully, this will get the recognition I think it deserves, because it’s one of the year’s best animated films and a perfect example of how animation for adults can be both for mature audiences only and mature, as opposed to just the former.

According to director Alex Ross Perry, the indie rock band Pavement didn’t want a documentary made about them. It’s easy to see why. Many rock docs tend to follow a set pattern, following the band’s story before gushing about their legacy. That’s the best-case scenario. At worst, you get a prestige biopic primed for awards season, with a cast that may or may not resemble the real deal. (Perry even opened the screening by jokingly welcoming the audience to James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic with Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown.) As Perry said during the Q&A, Pavement’s music defied easy categorization, and a hundred fans could each have different opinions about them. Encapsulating their career in a single movie about them wouldn’t make sense. This is why he didn’t make a single movie encapsulating their career. He made every single movie about Pavement, and just edited them together.

I wanted one “weird” pick for my NYFF screenings, and Pavements fit the bill more than I could’ve imagined. Part rockumentary, part mockumentary, brazenly satirical and refreshingly idiosyncratic, it is probably unlike any music movie I’ve seen. At first, it seems standard. It opens with “the world’s most important and influential band” Pavement breaking up in 1999 (which is described as “not a big deal”) and then reuniting in 2022 (“a huge deal”). As expected, from there the film alternates between two threads: tracing the band’s history through a wealth of archival material covering everything from international interviews to their appearance on Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and a present-day look at the band as they prepare for their first tour in 12 years (they briefly got back together in 2010). If that were it, I likely would’ve eaten this up anyway because I love 90s indie rock, but I probably wouldn’t have much to write about.

As mentioned, though, Pavement didn’t want a standard documentary, and Pavements is anything but. It’s not long into the movie before Perry plays his true hand. He’s not only directing a documentary about Pavement, but he’s also making an off-broadway jukebox musical about Pavement that re-interprets their songs. Not only that, he’s also making a museum dedicated to Pavement. Not only not only that, he’s also making a big-budget Pavement biopic with an all-star cast that seems primed for awards season. All at the same time.

From there, the movie basically becomes a mosaic, often using split screen to cover the movie’s five threads (six if you include the making of the biopic, which Perry also includes). Just in case that still seems too normal, half the movie is also a mockumentary. (The NYFF program guide called it a “sorta-documentary). Perry is filmed creating the musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, as a pretentious theater director, while the cast’s experience with Pavement ranges from them being longtime fans to finding out about them within the last few weeks. The bulk of the film’s humor, however, comes from the biopic, Range Life. Perry made his disdain towards these kinds of movies known during the Q&A, and it’s on full display here. I won’t spoil some of the best jokes, but suffice it to say, he was pretty spot on. The cast of the film-within-a-film is great and includes Fred Hechinger, Griffin Newman, and Nat Wolff as members of the band, while Tim Heidecker and Jason Schwartzman portray the executives of Matador Records. The real scene-stealer, however, is Stranger Things’ Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus. Playing himself, he believes he’s bound for Oscar gold for this part, and all I’ll say is that he gets a bit too involved trying to get into the role.

The more the film goes on, the more the line between truth and fiction begins to become a liquefied blur. Even after looking it up, I was surprised to find out what was real and what wasn’t. (HBO sponsored the documentary screenings at NYFF this year. Noticeably, they didn’t for this movie.) This all may seem like an experiment that has a good chance of falling apart, and it does drag a bit at over two hours. Yet as the film goes on, a coherent story does begin to emerge, and everything started to make some sense by the end. If you don’t know the story of Pavement, as I didn’t, this should be a good primer and a hilarious comedy to boot. If you do know the story of Pavement, this should be a refreshing reprieve from the standard treatment I’ve seen bands like this get. Either way, you are not prepared for Pavements, and hopefully you’ll all get to see it soon.

Spanning decades, the film tells the story of László Toth (Adrian Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who escapes a concentration camp and flees to America. After reconnecting with family in Pennsylvania, and awaiting news of his wife’s relocation, he meets the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who employs him for a massive project. In just two films, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, Brady Corbet established himself as a unique filmmaker. He’s also an auteur to a fault, and those movies, while certainly conveying a vision, left me underwhelmed. So I didn’t have high hopes for this movie, especially one of that length. Yet here I am, 4 hours later, as the elements of Corbet’s filmography have finally come together in a way that, for the most part, works.

The Brutalist has some of the best filmmaking of the year. The cinematography is stunning, which is fitting for a movie about art. It alternates between wide vistas and gorgeous landscapes, and more intimate closeup and handheld photography (which is notable for a film shot for such a grand format). The score is similarly incredible. Corbet’s last two movies were scored by Scott Walker, who has since unfortunately passed, but the composer for this movie, Daniel Blumberg, has proven himself more than up to the task of filling Walker’s shoes. Corbet supposedly made this movie on a small budget (reportedly under $10 million), and you wouldn’t know it from what you’re seeing onscreen.

Adrian Brody does a great job as Toth. Without giving too much away, he has a notable transformation as the film goes on, and it’s handled very well. He conveys both the resilience and the pain of being an outsider in America. (Brody said during the Q&A that he channeled his own parents’ experiences as both refugees and artists in the role.) The rest of the cast does a great job too. However, the real standout is Guy Pearce as Van Buren, easily one of the best supporting performances of this year. Playing a titan of industry, Pearce is charismatic yet intimidating, giving a grand portrayal that contains all of the worst impulses of those in power.

This is an epic, and what would a film like this be without some truly big ideas? I went into this expecting a sweeping look at the immigrant experience, and for the most part, that’s exactly what I got. Throughout the film, there’s a palpable sense of otherness for Brody’s Toth. Not just being a Hungarian in America, but a Jew in a predominately Christian country. The film’s portrayal of identity is powerful. Toth and his ideas aren’t just foreign to the elite he engages with, but objects of fascination that they, especially Van Buren, seek to exploit. The movie is also a portrait of industry in Pennsylvania and America at the time, supplemented by era-appropriate footage of educational films. It’s a very long film, but I did think the runtime was used well.

However, I did have some issues near the end of the film. The central themes and metaphors come to a head with a brutal moment that, without spoiling anything felt a bit too on the nose, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. I also thought that they could’ve done a better job sticking the landing. I plan on seeing this movie again when it comes out, and maybe I’ll have a different opinion of it. There’s a lot here, after all. A towering and deeply personal achievement, The Brutalist deserves to be seen on the big screen in a huge theater. While I didn’t think this was the best movie of the year, it is absolutely the biggest surprise of the year for me, and I’m definitely excited to see what Corbet does next. The movie comes out in theaters on December 20th.

The New York Film Festival, easily one of the city’s most prestigious film events, returned to Lincoln Center (as well as various other venues) last weekend for its 62nd edition. Unlike the Tribeca Festival, and other established film festivals like Sundance and Cannes (and especially Fall festivals like Venice and Toronto), the NYFF is not so much a place to premiere movies as it is a place to celebrate them. The festival’s feature film lineup is invitation-only, and contains some of the most anticipated movies from both the mainstream and the art house. In short, it’s a good chunk of awards season in about two and a half weeks. After a strike-addled edition last year, Hollywood’s A-list are heavily present for the festival once again. Yet, a big reason to attend the festival is to get the rare opportunity to see a lot of directors and actors from around the world (47 countries are reportedly represented in the lineup). Some of the year’s best movies are playing here, so I’m gonna try and talk about as many as I can, starting with probably the hottest ticket at this year’s festival.

If you don’t know the name Sean Baker, that may be about to change. He’s gotten a lot of love for his films, usually gritty comedy-dramas that spotlight marginalized communities. I first heard of him for Tangerine, his movie about transgender sex workers of color shot on an iPhone. From there he made The Florida Project, which earned massive acclaim and earned Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, as well as Red Rocket in 2021, which also recieved highly positive reviews. Well, I have to make a confession: I’m not the biggest fan of Sean Baker’s work, which makes me a minority in the art film community. Of course, I knew what was coming. Baker’s latest, Anora, is perhaps the most anticipated independent film this year. It won the Palme D’Or at Cannes and is a major awards season frontrunner. Given my attitude towards his last three movies, I knew it was touch and go on whether or not I’d enjoy this, so I’m just going to skip to the verdict right now.

Believe the hype. Anora really is that good.

Anora is a 23-year-old stripper in Brighton Beach who is assigned to a young man named Ivan because she speaks Russian. Ivan starts hiring her as an escort, during which Anora learns he’s the son of a Russian oligarch. It isn’t long before the two fall in love, and not even much longer than that when, partially because of romance and partially because Ivan has to go back to Russia, the two decide to get married so he’ll become an American citizen. Anora thinks she’s found the man of her dreams and struck it rich as a bonus….and then Ivan’s parents find out.

You are not ready for Anora. Baker’s films have always had an often darkly comic audacity to them, from frequent physical fights to things being set on fire, but this is easily his wildest movie to date. The initial feeling that this is an extremely graphic and profane version of a screwball comedy comes to a head in the film’s extended centerpiece sequence, which ranks among the year’s most accomplished, intense, and insane movie moments. To go any further would be criminal, but suffice it to say, it’s a heck of a ride.

It’s easily the funniest movie of Baker’s filmography. It isn’t all funny, though. You really feel for Anora throughout the movie, and there’s some utterly heartwrenching moments in this. It’s a very good script that combines riotous dialogue with a moving story about love, sex, money, and power. Sex work is a common topic in Baker’s films, but of all the movies he’s done, this is probably the most effective I’ve felt he’s been in conveying his themes. Mikey Madison gives an incredible performance as Anora, and at several moments during the movie, the audience burst into applause for her. That said, everyone in the cast does a great job in this. A lot of the humor in this movie comes from the characters playing off of one another (often loudly and with several four-letter words attached).

It all leads to up to an ending that will probably lead to as much discussion and interpretation as it will stay in your mind for quite a while. Combining anarchic, audacious comedy with heartfelt drama, Anora exceeded my expectations. Be sure to catch this one when it hits theaters on October 18th.