Still best known for his 1988 short The Cat Came Back - pretty much the archetypal National Film Board short film - Cordell Barker has been one of Canada's hidden gems for more than twenty years now. His latest is a slice of hand drawn animation set aboard a passenger train running out of control when the engineer proves more interested in one of his female passengers than in his job. Set to an original jazz score with minimal dialogue you can unpack layers of commentary and social satire packed into the images or you can just go along for the ride. Both approaches work just fine, thanks.
Found by Paramita Nath
Based on the poetry of Laotian refugee Souvankham Thammavongsa, Nath's film is a beautifully meditative piece, one that shows why shorts deserve to be treated as a distinct medium of their own rather than as less-long features. Beautifully shot and designed to illustrate the text being used it's a haunting, beautiful, autobiographical piece of work by the poet who walks the audience through his family history.
Pointless Film by Peter Wellington
Pointless? Well, sort of, but if you want a laugh this is a good place to start. Shot in striking black and white, it simply cuts back and forth between the same two shots as a man tries to haggle down the price of a futon he saw listed for sale online. Plenty of proof here that comedy is all about timing and performance and this has plenty of both.
The Island by Trevor Anderson
How often have you heard your local homophobe blabbing on about how great life would be if we just took all the gays and sent them off to live on some remote island where they could give each other AIDS and leave the rest of us alone? Well, Trevor Anderson has certainly heard it. Because he's gay. And he thinks it could be a pretty damn good idea, actually. This is why. There's nothing like a sharp wit to defang hate ...
The Spine by Chris Landreth
Canada's Oscar-winning animator (for Ryan in 2004) returns with another striking piece of work, this one a CG animated short tracking couples in therapy. The hook here is that the physical appearance of those involved twists and morphs to match their inner state as they speak and while I'm not one hundred percent sold on the actual animation used, it's a striking concept.
Man v Minivan by Spencer Maybee
Ah, true love. A wedding day should be one of the happiest of your life but one groom balks when his future in-laws present him with a minivan as a wedding gift. Gulp. Growing up involves eight passenger capacity, apparently, and he's just not ready for that ...
M by Felix Dufour-Laperriere
An immersive animation experience, a perfect fusion of sound and image. Description is difficult but imagine the scene captured when watching the micro-organisms in a drop of pond water through a microscope with the organisms replaced with crumpled tin cans and you're approaching the right neighbourhood.
Danse Macabre by Pedro Pires
We've featured Pedro Pires' short in these pages often enough by now that it really shouldn't require another endorsement but here one is anyway. Pires captures the path from life to death absolutely flawlessly, one of the most beautiful discourses on death you will ever witness.
The Armoire by Jamie Travis
Jamie Travis completes his Modern Family trilogy with this, the sadly absurd and wistful tale of a young boy whose best friend goes missing while playing hide and seek and simply never reappears. Travis' films are always gorgeously designed and quirky while still holding to an honest emotional core and this is no exception.
Night Mayor by Guy Maddin
Guy Maddin's tale of an immigrant family capturing the power of the Northern Lights and using it to beam images of Canada across the nation is absolutely vintage stuff. Maddin is a national treasure and films like this are why.
I'm not a big fan of the look of "THE SPINE" either, but there are some fabulous ideas about married couples and relationships in there which are presented in very compelling ways.
(And yea, Danse Macabre is a wonderful, moody bit of eye-candy)