Affairs of the Art

I'm not surprised by these reviews, especially in times that people are waaay extra politically correct and this short has no shame to be offensive and provocative.

Love every second of it. It was hilarious, with meaningful society criticisim, cool animation and unafraid to shock. My type of thing, my favourite of the shorts I've watched this year, but will never win the Oscars.

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.

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.

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!