News

 

Austin filmmaker Dano Johnson along with producers Jeffrey Travis and Seth Caplan are the inventors behind the animated family-friendly film Flatland 2: Sphereland. It's a follow-up to Flatland: The Movie -- both take kids on journeys into alternate dimensions with heroine Hex (Kristen Bell) and her trusty and mathematically inclined sidekick Puncto (voiced by Danny Pudi). Based on Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, these movies tell the stories of dwellers who live in a two-dimensional world with no knowledge or interest in dimensions behond their own.

In Flatland 2: Sphereland, young scientist Hex encounters more mathematical mysteries as she and her sidekick race to save a mission into Flatland's "outer space" and discover the true shape of the universe. Because Flatland exists in a world where the only dimensions known are length and width, Hex's felllow inhabitants don't believe of the existence of a third dimension.

Embedded above is the touching story of a pretty ukulele player and her pet puppet dog. It’s The Ballad of Friday and June, produced by the Jollyville Pictures filmmaking group in Austin, TX, which just this week relaunched their website. This specific film by them is directed by Tate English, whom I’ve never written about on Bad Lit before, and edited by Don Swaynos, whom I have.

There’s a strong streak of melancholia running through Friday and June that really makes the film absolutely endearing. The premise of pairing a ukulele player and a puppet would seem to anticipate a screwball comedy, but even though there are some very funny parts to the film, it really plays more like a heartwarming drama.

Part of the real key to the film’s success is the authenticity of the dog Friday’s dialogue, which sounds exactly like what a...