A former drag queen recalls a forgotten Parisian gay bar. A shapeshifting cat and butterfly dance through the cosmos. A cavalcade of old TV commercials rapidly morph into one another.
These are a few premises of the shorts that will be presented at the Byrd Theatre on Sunday as part of the Richmond Animation Festival. Now in its third year, the festival will screen a series of shorts before artist and experimental animator Lilli Carré takes the stage to discuss her work.
Dash Shaw, a cartoonist, animator and one of the festival’s co-creators, says he hopes audiences will come out in the numbers that they did last year.
“The turnout was fantastic,” he says. “There was a line around the block.”
This year’s festival will feature the following shorts: “Neon Mud Bucket,” directed by David Daniels; “Blue Fear,” directed by Lola Halifa-Legrand and Marie Jacotey; “MIMT,” directed by Ted Wiggin; “Make Me Psychic,” directed by Sally Cruikshank; “Erodium Thunk,” directed by Winston Hacking; “The Comic That Frenches Your Mind” by Bruce Bickford; and “Maurice’s Bar,” directed by Tzor Edery and Tom Prezman. The shorts were chosen by festival co-creators Jordan Bruner and Zack Williams, who are both artists and animators.
“It’s really a reflection of their tastes,” says Shaw of the shorts selection. “They lean towards funny things and well-drawn things, good figure drawing, good animation.”
“Neon Mud Bucket” features clips from several dozen strata-cut clay abstraction blocks that director David Daniels animated back in 1991. Strata-cut is a form of Claymation where “loaves” of clay are cut into thin slices to reveal their colorful interiors. This technique was memorably used in the animation sequences from “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and in the music video for Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time.” Shaw says “psychedelic” might be the simplest way to describe the short’s colorful, swirling formations.
“Blue Fear” concerns a couple in Provence who get ambushed on the way to visit the man’s parents. While the man escapes, the woman is held prisoner by a band of women on horseback and surreally forced to confront her doubts about her relationship. “It’s a really beautiful, colored pencil animation that kind of looks like fashion illustration,” Shaw says.
In “Make Me Psychic,” directed by legendary animator Sally Cruikshank, Anita the Duck buys a psychic device at a novelty store that lets her wreak havoc on a cocktail party. The look of the short is wild, heavily influenced by the surreal animation of Fleischer Studios in the 1930s.
Instead of the shorts having a unifying theme, Shaw compares this year’s programming to a buffet.
“The goal is to approach them with an open mind, because it’s going to come at you as a swirl of different drawing styles and different sensibilities,” says Shaw, whose graphic novel “Blurry” was published by The New York Review of Comics last year to critical acclaim.
The shorts will be followed by a presentation and Q&A session with experimental animator and artist Lilli Carré. A native of Los Angeles, Carré is co-director of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, an instructor of experimental animation at the California Institute for the Arts and recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in film and video. The Guggenheim described her work as focusing “on perceived misbehaviors, bodily communication, and the grotesque. She is particularly interested in the open-ended possibilities and histories of the animated body—simultaneously physical and virtual, free of expectations or fixed form.”
“They’re almost like body horror animations, how uncomfortable people are in their bodies, or how awkward we are in our human form,” says Shaw of Carré’s work. “That seems to be at the center of all her different cartoons. They usually have a female figure in the center of the narrative, but then they’re done in eclectic styles where one will look like it’s from a PC game in the ’80s and then the next one will be paint on acetate. There’s a sensibility and a personality through all of them, but the tool of each one changes.”
Shaw stresses that the festival’s program is a compelling one.
“This is not a boring, pretentious film festival,” he says. “This is very fun and entertaining, full of wild images and characters.”
The Richmond Animation Festival will take place at 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 27 at the Byrd Theatre, 2908 W. Cary St. Tickets are $15.
