Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.5

Animation Express Blu-ray Movie Review

The Film Board of Canada delivers a collection of salute-worthy shorts.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater June 7, 2010

Since 1941, the Film Board of Canada has sponsored and produced short films by some of the most influential artists in the world of animation, from the groundbreaking experiments of Norman McLaren, to Torill Kove’s The Danish Poet, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. If you haven’t heard of the FBoC, don’t fret—characteristically for America’s neighbor to the north, they keep a low profile—but for 70 years they’ve been one of the foremost advocates for independent animators, churning out hundreds of shorts and garnering almost just as many awards. While much of this work is absolutely brilliant, it goes largely unseen, simply because short form animation is a niche product and there’s really no easy way to market or sell it. Thankfully, the FBoC occasionally puts out a compilation disc, like the spectacular collection Animation Express, which gives us easy access to 39 of the film board’s most wildly imaginative and technically stunning productions from the past 10 years.

The incomparable Madame Tutli-Putli...

The collection is incredibly varied, both thematically and in terms of technique. If you think of animation as primarily a kid’s medium—the stuff of Pixar and Dreamworks—you’ll be surprised by the maturity and depth of many of the shorts. On the disc’s menu you can select films from four categories: For All, Humour, Visual Delights, and Social Issues. The shorts in the last two sections, while not necessarily didactic or overly preachy, definitely explore some complex themes. Drux Flux makes an abstraction out of the concept of industry, using quick-cut images of factories set against a clanging, propulsive score. The Spine, from director Chris Landreth, is a freakishly surreal story of couples in counseling for codependency, with CGI characters that morph, melt, and decompose in reaction to their emotional states. And Subservience finds two bourgeois snobs trekking across a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape with their servants, a reflection on the injustices of class. Of course, it’s not all so serious. There’s plenty of kid-friendly material to be found in the “For All” and “Humour” sections—the M.C. Escher-inspired junior high anxiety of Nightmare at School, the squawks and clucks of At Home With Mrs. Hen—but even here, I think the shorts will appeal more to adult sensibilities, as sheer slapstick is often downplayed for verbal and visual cleverness.

And you will be awed—near constantly—by the visuals, which marry technical precision with a charming, obviously hand-made quality that’s often lost on big budget feature films. Just about every form of animation is represented in the collection. Rain, a lonely, elegiac look at a downpour in the big city, is all done in charcoal and pencil, a somber medium that perfectly matches the film’s message. Sleeping Betty, a modern, deliriously absurd, almost Monty Python-ish take on the traditional Sleeping Beauty story, is drawn with crisp black lines and filled in with vivid solid color, aping the style of the Robin Hood cartoons you used to see in the Sunday paper’s comics. In The True Story of Seaney Beane, a tale of cannibalism and motherly woe, eraser dust becomes an integral part of the image. Some of the shorts, like the First Nation origin story How People Got Fire, flit through various techniques, from pencil to watercolor to rotoscope-like CGI. Computer generated imagery is definitely in the minority here, but the few examples we do get are strikingly original. Besides his bizarre counseling story The Spine, director Chris Landreth also contributes the Academy Award-winning Ryan, in which a CGI version of himself has a conversation with a computerized avatar of down-and-out animator Ryan Larkin, who was influential in the late 1960s before falling on hard times. In contrast to the complexity of digital animation, we also have exceptionally simple ink-on-paper experiments, like the free-form (and possibly controversial) Robes of War, in which an Arab woman’s burqa mutates and shifts into military metaphors.

Pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and CGI are all fine, but I’m a sucker for stop-motion, so Animation Express had my attention from the moment I noticed it contained the Academy Award-nominated Madame Tutli-Putli, which, I say without hesitation, is the most impressively articulated—not to mention most wholly unnerving—“claymation” short I’ve seen in years. This may sound strange, but trust me, Madame Tutli-Putli is the Jacob’s Ladder of short-form stop-motion animation. What begins with the titular Madame standing on a train platform with tons of baggage in tow, becomes a terrifying metaphysical journey through the darkness and into the light, Tibetan Buddhism-style. Along the way, we get a lasciviously leering tennis pro, chess players who sleep in their suitcases, and shadowy, organ- harvesting hobgoblins who track mud all over the place. It truly has to be seen to be believed. Montreal-based filmmakers Chris Levis and Maciek Szczerbowski spent four years crafting the 17- minute short, which features a title character with real human eyes computer-grafted onto her clay face, creating a disconcertingly realistic effect.

It’s easily worth buying the collection to have Madame Tutli-Putli in glorious high definition alone, so the addition of 38 other shorts—many of them nearly as compelling—makes Animation Express a no-brainer. Really, there’s something for everyone here, and there are only two or three duds in the lot, like HA’Aki, a pointlessly impressionistic take on a hockey game, and Pimp My Boat, a riff on, yes, Pimp My Car. (Although I did get a few laughs out of the fact that, since it’s in French, the main character pronounces it Pimp My Butt. An entirely different connotation.) I’ve really only scratched the surface of what this compilation has to offer, but it would be reductive to say any more. Part of the joy of a collection like this is discovering favorites for yourself. Suffice it to say that if you love original, heartfelt work by independent artists and filmmakers, Animation Express is a steal with nearly four hours of entertaining, imaginative content.

Playlist:
The Danish Poet – Torill Kove (15:02)
At Home with Mrs. Hen – Tali (7:52)
Rains – David Coquard-Dassault (7:44)
How People Got Fire – Daniel Janke (16:04)
Sainte Barbe – Claude Barras and Cédric Louis (7:43)
Nightmare at School – Catherine Arcord (8:45)
Flutter – Howie Shia (6:53)
Uncle Bob’s Hospital Visit – Jo Dee Samuelson (14:12)
Runaway – Cordell Barker (9:11)
Sleeping Betty – Claude Cloutier (9:17)
Land of the Heads – Claude Barras and Cédric Louis (6:11)
Cot Cot – Pierre Sylvestre (6:18)
Paradise – Jesse Rosensweet (7:50)
Here and There – Oborn (9:01)
The Necktie – Jean-Francois Lévesque (12:18)
Pimp My Boat – Marc Daigle (5:12)
Invasion of the Space Lobsters – Janet Pearlman (6:49)
Ryan – Chris Landreth (13:56)
Retouches – Georges Schwizgebel (5:36)
Peggy Baker: Four Phrases – Howie Shia (5:26)
Vive La Rose – Bruce Alcock (6:16)
The Real Place – Cam Christiansen (5:27)
Terra – Alan Pakernyk (4:42)
HA’Aki – Iriz Pääbo (4:53)
Drux Flux – Theodore Ushev (4:50)
Madame Tutli-Putli – Chris Levis and Maciek Szczerbowski (17:15)
Forming Game – Malcolm Sutherland (5:28)
Spare Change – Laurie Gordon, Ryan Larkin (7:04)
The Spine – Chris Landreth (11:19)
The Man Who Slept – Inés Sedan (11:46)
Stationary – Monica Rho (5:20)
The True Story of Seaney Beane – Elizabeth Hobbs (10:40)
Roots – Alison Reiko Loader (10:57)
Engine 371 – Kevin Langdale (9:07)
Subservience – Patrick Bouchard (8:11)
Come Again in Spring – Belinda Oxford (11:51)
Hungu – Nicolaus Brault (9:11)
Robes of War – Michéle Cournoyer (5:14)
Rosa Rosa – Félix Dufourre-Laperrière (8:41)

Animation Express Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

With the sheer variety of animation styles (and budgets), you'd expect Animation Express to be all over the place visually, but I was surprised by how consistently striking the collection is as a whole, picture quality-wise. To get the negatives out of the way first, with nearly four hours of high definition material crammed onto a BD-50, there are bound to be some compression-related issues. And yes, if you have a large screen and you look for it, you'll definitely notice some slight— slight—macroblocking in out-of-focus portions of the image, along with the occasional bout of motion artifacts and the rare instance of stair-step banding in subtle color gradients. Really, though, these defects are negligible, and in no way detracted or distracted from my enjoyment of the collection. With the exception of a handful of films that look upscaled, like Paradise, Rains, and Retouches, along with Pimp My Boat, which is presented in 1080i, all of the shorts have been given 1080p/AVC encodes that are simply stunning. With pen, pencil, and charcoal work, lines are crisp, and oftentimes you can even make out the texture of the paper the film was drawn on. Other mediums are just as impressive. The few CGI pieces are vibrant and dimensional, and the stop-motion, "claymation" shorts are uniformly jaw dropping (Madame Tutli-Putli, Sainte Barbe, and Land of the Heads are real stand-outs). All films benefit from high definition, but the increase in color and clarity is especially advantageous for animation. This is one collection that you'll return to frequently, if only to show your favorite shorts to your friends.

Animation Express Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

You may be disappointed to learn that Animation Express lacks lossless audio, but you shouldn't be. The included English and French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround tracks sound just fine, and are more than capable of handling the limited audio requirements that most of these shorts have anyhow. I mean, these films aren't exactly mini-Michael Bay action epics, with booming dynamic range and non-stop cross-channel sound effects. The vast majority of the shorts have a front-heavy mixture of a dialogue/narration and score, though that's not to say there isn't some fantastic sound design at work in some of the sonically beefier productions. Music is the key ingredient to the mood established in most of the films, and whether its provincial French accordion sounds, as in The Necktie, or droning, elegiac ambience, the scores sound wonderful, with a grounded low end and plenty of crisp detail. The sound effects in many of the shorts are excellent as well, from the industrial menace of Drux Flux to the chicken squawks galore in both Cot Cot and At Home With Mrs. Hen. Dialogue and narration, when present, ride high in the mix, and there are no muffles, drop- outs, or hisses to be heard. Optional English and French subtitles are available in easy to read white lettering.

Animation Express Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Okay, so technically, the disc includes 26 animated shorts and 13 "bonus" shorts, but these bonus shorts are just additions that weren't present on the previous DVD release of Animation Express. It has nothing to do with quality or length, and the "bonus" shorts are lumped in with the rest when you hit "play all," meaning, there is no "bonus shorts" section on menu. Anyway, if you don't count these so-called bonuses as supplementary features, the only other extras on the disc are four 1080i trailers, Stories and Destinies (2:05), Volatile Materials (1:37), Mindtravel (1:31), and Seven to See! (1:31).

Animation Express Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I love having a compilation like this on Blu-ray. Instead of tracking down all of these films on YouTube or the Film Board of Canada website, I can pop in this disc and bliss out to some of the world's most original and technically accomplished animated shorts. If you've already got Fantastic Mr. Fox and the Wallace & Gromit set, this is the next must-have animation release to add to your collection. Highly Recommended.