Feed your Head - with Animation

I love film festivals. And Aesthetica/ASFF & Manchester/MAF give you 2 in one week which tends to make your head rather full. Also, strangely, it tends to give you a sense of existential crisis. (This film festival is full of film students. Only film students. We are making movies in order to train people to make movies. My life is pointless. sort of thing). Once again I was amused to hear some informed scoffing (Huh, its just a one-character shot. Too easy) and relieved to hear other people voicing my own confusion. There is always at least one film I get to the end of thinking "What? WTAF? I don't get it"... but sadly not in a good, "ooh this really challenges your assumptions and makes you think" kind of way but more in a "either I am really dense or this animator is just failing to communicate, and why the hell do ALL of these animations have funny little firefly things in" kind of way.  There was one which featured fireflies as protagonists, and one in which they were the metaphor that carried the plot...but about 8 more in which I just felt like animators were afraid of stillness so there had to be some kind of random movement in the background. Or, ooh, maybe fireflies are this year's big trend. And I've missed it. Again.

http://pepelemorse.tumblr.com/

There were some fabulous films, my favourite from MAF was probably Lucrece Andreae's Pepe le Morse /Grandpa Walrus (the story, the drawings, the believability of the characters) but there was also some really effective mixing of media/ style/ scene in Daisy Jacob's the Full Story - mixing drawn and painted images seamlessly with pixillation...(and that was something else besides bugs that was very big this year, live action pixillated)and Carlos Gomez Salamanca's Lupus, a kind of animated documentry/ reflection.
ASFF seemed to have more stuff that was visually dark and highly textured, but also with - well - JOY. The biggest hit with the audiences seemed to be Jack Bennett's Not the End of the World, because it captured so accurately the excruciating intensity of teenage first crushes and confusion. Once again the programmers appeared not to have anticipated that anyone might want to see all the animation programmes (rather than pick-and-mix through experimental, music videos and a bit of thriller, say) so trying to see them all meant travelling down on two separate days and a killer sunday schedule. Thank goodness for the nice warm teabar at City Screen.
And once again MAF co-incided with the latenight xmas market, so enabling shameless retail interludes in the gaps between my selected programmes. This enabled me to empty my head (aw look, baby penguin xmas baubles) before filling it again with ideas, questions, inspirations and enthusiasm for my next animation experiment. Hoorah!