Welcome to Your Daily Short, a new feature on Film.com that will highlight and stream a short film at high noon. Every weekday. Every week.
TODAY’S SHORT: “The Wedding” (Simon Cottee) 2011
RUNNING TIME: 5:26
WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT: What better way to start your weekend than with a gorgeous, melancholy Australian animated short? Ok, so maybe sadness isn’t necessarily the best note for a Friday, but how about beauty? “The Wedding” is a graceful little film, the story of a teenager heading to his father’s shipboard wedding, a father who abandoned him years before. He takes along his journal, a relic of his difficult childhood, with the intent of throwing it into the sea. Of course, nothing so poetic goes precisely as we’d planned.
The whole thing is narrated by the protagonist, including the voices of his father and his father’s fiancée. It’s reminiscent of a StoryCorps cartoon, which animate around pre-existing first-person narratives from the program’s many interviews. Yet the StoryCorps shorts can occasionally seem too much an uncreative representation of the audio, like Tuesday’s frustrating daily short “This Is Water.” “The Wedding” is nothing of the kind. It’s a triumph of collaboration, much more a conversation between animator and storyteller than the uncomplicated visual representation of narrative.
The script is by Jack Vening, an Australian writer of short stories. There are lines of bold, literary quality; the fiancée is “tall like she’d been cut from God’s original clay to hold up a corner of the earth.” Animator/director Simon Cottee mostly lets these lyrical moments stand on their own, choosing not to embellish them with his imagery. Rather, the bravura moments of animation come independently, woven in between the florid prose. There’s a particularly impressive bit toward the end when the boy imagines what will happen to his journal after being tossed into the surf, sinking down to be eaten by fish and inhabited by crabs. The near-constant but intuitive score from Jean-Baptiste Guignard keeps it all together, the final layer of a film with a great deal of subtle intelligence.
“The Wedding” plays tonight as part of Rooftop Films’ “Love Hurts” program. The evening also includes the Oscar-nominated animated short “Head Over Heels,” a film by Amy Seimetz, and Tribeca favorite “RPG OKC.”
Watch the previous Daily Short: “Bridges”
Do you have a favorite short film that you would like us to feature as Your Daily Short? Whether it’s something you love, something you made, or both, send it along to Filmdotcomshorts@Gmail.com and you might see it on the site!
Categories: ColumnsTags: Animation, Daniel Walber, Short Film, Simon Cottee, The Wedding, Your Daily Short
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