Affairs of the Art

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.

Director Joanna Quinn's lovable protagonist Beryl returns, telling her own story of her childhood, her family, and herself as an artist and a mother.

The storytelling in Affairs of the Art is fluid and compelling, the characters strikingly honest, and Joanna's distinctive style absolutely captivating. In this film about art, each hand drawn frame of the animation is a work of art in itself.

Affairs of the Art absolutely deserves all the awards buzz it's received, with wins across the festival circuit as well as BAFTA and Oscar nominations.

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!

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!!!

There are worlds that mix with each other and are forced to coexist even though they seem strange to each other. In Affairs of the Art, family, death and art are balanced and they also coexist, sometimes too much, with each other. The characters, therefore, are most imaginative, realistic and strange; each with their own individual passion, each with their own contrasting qualities.

Animation plays a fundamental role in the construction of such a twisted and realistic artistic-family world, and it uses each of the advantages of traditional animation by hand to stay chaotic, not to fall into the static, the dead. Its best quality could also be its worst mistake: its intricate narrative, without connection or adherence, which serves mainly to complement the highly imaginative style of animation... to show us the observation, innovation, resolution, experience and preservation that comes from the soul of the artist, the soul of the Beryl family and probably of every person who indulges in art.

Of course, it also has its disadvantages, and those come from its great ability to offend its audience, to appear too cruel, too exaggerated and disrespectful, to generate conflict and disapproval. Probably if you are very sensitive you should not see it and hope that it fascinates you.