ShortoftheWeek

The post apocalyptic sub-genre is a particularly fitting one for short film. Figure: With almost everyone dead, there's not a whole lot going on. Most of the features taking place in these dim tomorrows could have their plots reduced to ten minutes. A majority of the run times are used up by guys in BDSM-gear driving dune buggies across ruined landscapes.

Genesis Antipode, produced, written, and directed by American J.R. Robinson in New Zealand, takes the post apocalyptic story to its character-driven basics. There's a man and a woman, and the rest of the world is dead. Too bad she despises him. Told in two timelines, the human race is no more when the film begins. Jeffrey and Rebecca stay close to each other, outside of the city for fear of what may lie there. They had met before the fall of civilization, on a blind date. He was her intellectual superior, but in every other way, he lagged behind. Rebecca, an attractive, social woman, was repulsed by his inability to grasp even basic cultural norms. However Jeffrey, a dweebish scientist, thought things had gone swimmingly. He learns otherwise, and then everyone else dies.

This is one of the most compelling visions of a destroyed world you'll find on film. It's not exciting, but with believable acting and a far too believable situation, it sticks in your brain. Genesis Antipode is both depressing and relaxing. Is there hope in its suggested future? That's up to you to decide. It presents two people in the most awkward of situations and lets the audience imagine what they would do in their place.

In 2000, Father and Daughter won the Academy Award for Best Short Film for its Dutch director Michael Dudok de Wit. For such a short (eight minutes) movie it has a remarkable capacity to move an audience. The story of a father who leaves his daughter and rows off into the ocean, it commences with two figures riding their bicycles, the smaller of the wheels in perfect symmetry with the larger. The father and daughter climb to the top of a hill at which point the father alights, hugs his daughter before climbing down to the seashore. He cannot resist running back and holding the girl one last time before rowing off towards the distant horizon. The girl runs up and down against the skyline as the sun gradually sets. There is no explanation. She returns again and again to her vantage point on the cliff to peer out to sea for his return. Each return marks a passage in her life from child to adolescent, mother and eventually old woman. And still she returns to search for the father who left her.

The landscape of the Netherlands with its wide skies and tall poplar trees is the backdrop to the movie. The sky and landscape is a delicate colour wash of brown, grey, sepia, sometimes hints of green or blue. The drawing is pencil and charcoal, the drawings scanned and colour added digitally. Remarkably in a film that deals in emotion, there is no facial detail whatsoever. Often the figures are drawn in silhouette. This can be remarkably effective in conveying mood: the old woman toiling up the hill, the flapping arms of the child, the teenager gliding down the slope on her bike, which in another later scene will simply not stand upright. Always the brushwork is spare, perhaps a stroke that transforms into a slender girl or a smudge for the squared old woman. Each shot is exquisite: the long shadows of trees or bicycle; seascape and sky, vast and empty. The seasons change with a rustle of leaves or the girl struggling up the hill against a wind that bends trees. The music by Norman Roger is sympathetic to the theme, essentially a lilting tune but arranged with tone and depth.

This astonishingly accomplished and poetic movie fulfils in every sense. Michael Dudok de Wit was born in 1953 and educated in Holland. In 1978, he graduated from the West Surrey College of Art in England. His films include Tom Sweep (1992), The Monk and the Fish (1994) and The Aroma of Tea (2006). You might also have seen the rather classy commercial for United Airlines, A Life. Given his draftsman-like qualities, Michael is much in demand as an illustrator for books. My Christmas present from my family, and well recommended, was Best of British Animation Awards Vol.4 that includes Michael's Oscar winning short.

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In the words of its makers, The Pearce Sisters—a short film based on the story by Mick Jackson and produced by Aardman Animations—is "a bleak hearted tale of love, loneliness, guts, gore, nudity, violence, smoking and cups of tea." And you know how well tea parties and loneliness mix. Enter the sisters, Lol and Edna Pearce.

Living "a miserable existence on a remote and austere strip of coast", the two old spinsters are eager to find company, with the complicity of the sea. Possibly male—handsome— grateful? Though they'd hardly win the heart of any living man, The Pearce Sisters won Best Short Animation at the 2008 BAFTA Awards.

Director Luis Cook has been at Aardman Animations since 1994, but this is his first (second, if you count the title sequence for the London Film Festival) non-commercial work. At a time when beauty often seems less exploratory, and more of a formula, it's refreshing to see a film dive into the aesthetics of ugliness. With every detail in every scene transporting us into this parallel universe born from Luis Cook's mind—a world both austere and humorous at the same time. As my friend Mike appropriately asked, "If the sisters had only gotten a bikini wax… would things have turned out different?"

One can only guess.

Read this and other online film reviews at www.ShortoftheWeek.com