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AFF review: Animated shorts at the Hideout Sunday
Scrappy shorts, the farm system of the film festival circuit, don’t get much love — especially animated shorts. They’re for kids, right?
Yes and no. But what was on display Sunday night at the Hideout was a blaze of creativity, from stop motion black-and-white to computer-generated work. Lily Sun’s apparently autobiographical “Sketchi,” about a girl’s efforts to bring her dead dog back to life, definitely had the “awwww” factor,” while Myles and Greg McLeod’s “The Moon Factor” was alternately (and deliberately) crude and sophisticated visually, like something out of Guillermo del Toro’s sketchbook. “All in Your Head” was a black-and-white navel-gazer about obsessive-compulsive disorder.
But the DIYers didn’t have a prayer up against “The Gruffalo,” directed by Max Lang and Jakob Schuh. Based on the children’s book of the same name and boasting top-notch animation and a boatload of voice talent — Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, John Hurt — the story is one of a mouse taking a stroll in the forest and outsmarting a succession of would-be predators by telling them the story of a presumably mythical Gruffalo. Completely charming.
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