This year’s Manipulate Festival featured a programme of animated short films, each comprising 90 minutes sessions and showcasing up to 10 films created by animators from across the globe.
Bringing messages about the human condition, the environment, gender issues and politics as well as just surreal takes on life, this selection encompassed as many styles of animation as it did subject matter.
Each programme was separately curated with Shorts 1 bringing a collection of Eastern European surrealist animations dating from 1965 to 2022; Shorts 2 featured themes of social justice and protest and Shorts 3 showed non-dialogue shorts, programmed with d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers specifically in mind.
Across the three programmes, some films were easier on the eye than others; some with a clearer message than others and some whose aesthetic value did not outweigh what were at times disturbing messages despite the skill and imagination involved in their making.
The opener to Shorts 1 was the stop motion 1965 Czech film from Jiri Trnka entitled The Hand. Intriguing and elegant, with the stop motion skill of acute attention to detail, it shows a quiet Pierrot style potter whose ordered life is disrupted as he tries to deal with the power of a stranger who arrives in the form of a giant gloved hand.
Mai Vu’s 2023 moving stop motion Spring Roll Dream from Vietnam, whose ingenuity in this creation is breathtaking, deals with a clash of culture through food and a small family who’ve moved to the US from Vietnam.
The delicately drawn animation from Nazrin Aghamaliyeva in her 2023 Azerbaijan film entitled Hadis has a water colour look and a strong fairy tale quality that belies the seriousness of the story that is dedicated to Hadis Najafi who was killed in Iran in 2022.
In programme 3, Juliette Laboria’s 2021 Pests (Nuisibles) from France shows a swarm of wasps evoking behaviour in humans that has unforeseen consequences. The story plays out using animation set against clearly defined brushwork, drawing attention to the art to good effect.
Czech filmmaker Andrea Szelesová’s 2021 film Sisters takes us to a surreal world in which one giant sister is trapped in a weirdly nourishing desert where she grows and is fed by her tiny sister. Made with line drawing and block colours, it is a strangely compelling film that’s not without humour.
Another 2021 film, this time from Argentina’s Agostina Ravazzola is Sow with the story of a scientist who sows a plant that destroys worldwide communication. The result in terms of animation is the creation of a creeper that looks like a nightmare version of Bosco Verticale.
Add to these the 2022 Boys Clap, Girls Dance from Dens Springer in USA about a young girl approaching adolescence using a variety of styles including a look of Mabel Lucy Atwell characters, and the Croatian 1969 Mask of the Red Death based on the story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe from Pavao Štalter and Branko Ranitović whose exquisite red themed artwork is backdrop to animation and you have a fine eclectic example of animation styles that provoke and entertain.
The programme took place on 3rd February at Summerhall with online session available over the weekend of 10th and 11th February 2024.
Age recommend 15+ because of some of the themes.
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 