Cartoon caravan

The seventh annual Sommets du
cinéma d’animation de Montréal offers a
spectacular overview of animated films

OLD-TIME TOON: Émile Reynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot (1892)

by MALCOLM FRASER

The Cinémathèque québécoise, proud promoters off all things arty, have been running their Sommets du cinéma d’animation de Montréal for seven years now. This year, they’ve caught the local virus and expanded to a festival format, showcasing a panoply of animation highlights over a three-day event. Spanning local, international and historical films, the fest has quite an impressive range of offerings.

The fest includes a program of work from Quebec and Canada; given Montreal’s longstanding international rep as an animation hotbed, it’s not surprising that many local artists are spotlighted. Théodore Ushev brings us the visually stunning and innovative Drux Flux, a breakneck-paced history of industrialization using a variety of techniques, some of which might expand viewers’ definition of animation itself. Drux Flux won the prize for best Canadian film at this year’s prestigious Ottawa Animation Festival.

Other local highlights include Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre’s Passages, a beautifully animated and harrowing story about the filmmaker’s traumatizing experience with local health care during her pregnancy, and a brilliantly rendered retelling of an African legend. Transplanted Calgarian Malcolm Sutherland, a Jutra-award-winning animator who also designed the fest’s psychedelic poster, presents his latest film Forming Game/Jeu de forme, and will make an appearance to discuss his work at a free screening of the film on Saturday, Dec. 6.

GLOBAL GOODIES

One of the fest’s must-see highlights is Australian animator Dennis Tupicoff’s Chainsaw, a bravura tour de force that mixes a ’60s-style educational cartoon, a tragic tale of marital infidelity and the historical tale of a love triangle between Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner and famous bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. Chainsaw won the top prize at this year’s Ottawa festival as well as a number of other awards on the international circuit, and its imaginative structure and unique animation style make the accolades well deserved.

A good number of the fest’s highlights come from France (almost all are subtitled in English). Jérémy Clapin’s Skhizein is the tragicomic tale of a man who gets hit by a meteorite and finds himself in the inconvenient existential bind of being displaced 91 centimetres from himself. Jean-Luc Gréco and Catherine Buffet’s La sacoche perdue tells a French fable from the Middle Ages, with appropriately old-school animation style. Benjamin Renner’s multiple prize-winner La queue de la souris is a charming tale about a crafty mouse’s efforts to avoid being eaten by a cat. And Yann J’s prize-winning Berni’s Doll is a perverse, bittersweet social commentary about a lonely factory worker who orders an advanced form of sex doll.

Our friendly neighbours to the south are well represented, though there’s nothing here that would fit at either Disney, MTV or a gross-out cartoon comp. Don Hertzfeldt’s I Am So Proud of You, a sequel to his previous festival hit Everything Will Be OK, follows its everyman stick-figure Bill through a strangely compelling meditation on memory and existential angst. Stacey Steers’ Phantom Canyon is a surreal romance made entirely with photographs from proto-cinema innovator Eadweard Muybridge.

BABY MAMA TRAUMA:
Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre’s Passages

PAST AND FUTURE

Fans of animation history will thrill at the presentation of Du praxinoscope au cellulo, a program mounted by France’s Centre national de la cinématographie which spotlights French animation from 1892 to 1948. Émile Reynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot, a colour cartoon from 1892, kicks off the program, which chronicles the development of different styles and includes work from filmmakers both famous (Émile Cohl, whose classic Fantasmagorie will be shown here) and lesser known (stop-motion pioneer Bob Zoubowitch among many more).

Du praxinoscope au cellulo is spread over three programs—an evening screening and two afternoon programs for the whole family, one targeted at kids aged three and up and another for ages seven and up. Altogether a good way to get the young ’uns a solid education in the wonders of the pre-digital age. All the screenings will also include Philippe Truffault’s Comment on sauve un film, a humourous take on film preservation made in celebration of cinema’s centennial in 1996. For those interested in how the program came together, curator Jean-Baptiste Garnero will be giving a free talk on Dec. 7.

Another program compiles an international selection of student animation from recent years. Concordia grads Sébastien Deschênes and Eva Cvijanovic are represented along with work from Europe, South Korea and Mexico. The variety of techniques and breadth of imagination in these student works is a good sign that this festival will have plenty of material to choose from in the years to come.

LES SOMMETS DU CINÉMA D’ANIMATION
DE MONTRÉAL STARTS THIS FRIDAY,
DEC. 5 AT CINÉMATHÈQUE QUÉBÉCOISE.
CHECK WWW.CINEMATHEQUE.QC.CA
FOR MORE INFORMATION.