Affairs of the Art

This is the best animated film I have seen since the trio from Belleville. What a great work! There is so much LIFE in this short movie!! So much creativity, ideas, surprises, curiousness, joy and talent that it's bursting at the seams. This should have won an Oscar but I guess that for the sanctimonious Hollywood this is way too creative, too smart, too realistic.

Joanna Quinn is amazingly talented not only as an animator, but her voicing the main character gave the real breath of life to Beth and the whole story.

I'm so glad that YouTube, in its infinite unpredictability and randomness, suggested me this video! Thank you Joanna and Les and all the crew!!!

Let's start with the animation; imagine if you took the animation of the Aha song Take on me, passed it to artist Gerald Scarfe to colour, then let Raymond Briggs round the contours of the drawings out before passing it to the animation team behind Akira for camera angles before they pass it back to Briggs, then letting it marinate in the cruelty of early 70s: the animation is spell binding and draws you in, and that's the really clever part of the hook, because when the film moves on to the cruelty of children and how vengeful they can be, you can't look away.

The story is a life snapshot of. Beryl, a child of the sixties recounting her family life events, and how she arrived at nearly 60 realising that her opportunity in art may have slipped by.

That's all I'm going to give you! Just bloody watch it!

The animation is truly incredible. Now, I usually enjoy quirky characters, but there was just way too much animal abuse in this short for me, that it was repulsive and the disgusting sister and the dead body was very hard to watch. While I'm happy NFB got an Oscar nod, I just wish it was for a different film.

Nice drawings, explosion of imagination, fair portrait of a family and dark humor in large doses. And exploration of cruelty, in different forms, with cold results.

The irony rules in this case , and it is very less pleasant. Because , as a sort of roller coster, it is a splendid analysis of different ages and their bizzare behaviors, crisis of maturity, a gray marriage and the kids and their ways of succes.

Not the last, moving for sort of nice translation of melancholia, for familiar crumbs of childhood , for dialogues and small details , for the spirit of child, from fascinations or experiments to the pure forms of cruelty.

So, a sort of short animation animated by reflections of eccenticity.

Greetings again from the darkness. Is it acceptable to call Joanna Quinn and writer Les Mills 'frequent collaborators' when they have only made 4 short films together over a 34-year period? Regardless, this is their first since the BAFTA nominated DREAMS AND DESIRES: FAMILY TAKES (2006), and it features the return of the character Beryl (voiced again by Menna Trussler). This time their work has been rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Animated Short Film.

Beryl is an older lady admittedly obsessed with art. She's been that way since childhood and we see that she drew 'all the time', including the walls of her bedroom. During this 16-minute short film, Beryl reminisces about her family and the role art has played in her life. She explains how each family member had their own obsession, and mind you, Beryl is presenting all of this through the eye of an artist. The visuals and (hand-drawn) animation are truly spectacular and fit so well with Beryl's frenetic storytelling.

We each have our own zany family stories, and Ms. Quinn uses Beryl to discuss obsessive behavior. Topics include plastic surgery, taxidermy, and death ... each captured with artistic flair. There is a great line about being 'Trigger-happy', and this may be also be about "hyper-futurism" or vodka, take your pick.