This international festival of animated films and videos runs Friday through Sunday, November 7 through 9, at the Biograph, Chicago Cultural Center, and DePaul University Student Center, 2250 N. Sheffield. Tickets are $6, $5 for children under 12, and are available at the venue box office 15 minutes prior to showtime. Festival passes, which grant priority seating, are $100 to $295; for more information see www.cineme.org or call 312-733-3827.
Web Animation
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Leaving aside a few commercial entries that demonstrate only slick technique (e.g., a TV ad for a toenail-infection remedy), most of these 17 shorts convey impressive ideas. Using branching woodcutlike lines, Hammer Rall’s The Erl-King brings to life the Goethe poem about a boy’s terrifying nocturnal horseback ride through haunted woods. Also inventively stylized is Aaron Augenblick’s Plugs McGinnis, Seeing Eye Dog, the story of a randy pooch leading his clueless master to a strip club depicted in a motley patchwork of swatches. David Chai’s witty 25 Ways to Die is a mordant inventory of improbable demises: in “Death by Salmon” a spawning fish leaps upstream into the victim’s urethra. Transition Waltz by Joseph A. Davis is a layered reverie in which a woman slips between her workaday life and her jazzy imagination. 145 min. (Bill Stamets) (Biograph, 11:30 am)
A widely divergent program of 18 shorts. John Cernak’s Dear, Sweet Emma is a viciously funny work about a misanthropic widow who harbors a cruel secret. Kevin Johnson’s Early Bloomer is a fantastically detailed underwater story about a quartet of fish, punctuated with sharp cuts and propelled by a dazzling feel for movement and release. Bill Domonkos’s eerie, Poe-inspired The Fine Art of Poisoning is tinged with undercurrents of dread and malice and solidified by the striking work of composer Jill Tracy. Kelly Williamson’s Ollie the Otter is terse and pretty funny; Carolle-Shelley Abrams’s Oola Oop Diner is a crudely drawn satire of French narcissism and American vengefulness. 91 min. (Patrick Z. McGavin) (Biograph, 1:00 )
The Aesthetic Universe of Animation
Vladimir Nepevny’s penetrating documentary profiles pioneering animator and avant-garde artist Aleksander Alekseyev, best known in America for the brilliant title sequence of Orson Welles’s The Trial. A Russian who spent much of his career in France, Alekseyev invented the pin-screen technique, which uses illuminated pinheads to create pointillistic pictures, and constructed dense, frightening images from light and shadow. Collecting sharp testimony from Alekseyev’s family, colleagues, and disciples, Nepevny surveys the artist’s life and work without omitting the darker aspects of his complicated character. In English and subtitled French and Russian. 54 min. (Patrick Z. McGavin) (Biograph, 8:00)
See listing for Friday, November 7. (Biograph, 9:00 am)
