Cartoon Noir

Having noir in the title may give this anthology of animated shorts a certain continental flair, but it isn't exactly helpful in providing a feel for the works included here -- at least not in the way “sick and twisted” and “outrageous” do for other similar collections of modern animation. Its six works aren't cartoon versions of film noir, hard-boiled melodramas drenched in existential atmosphere, and (with one exception) they aren't literally noir, graphic images in pure black and white. What they are, rather, are a hodgepodge of narrative and non-narrative films using a hodgepodge of animation techniques, from traditional cel animation to processed video to stop-motion puppet animation. Some are impressionistic, such as Paul Vester's “Abductees,” in which drawings are intercut with video footage of individuals describing their abductions by alien beings, and Piotr Dumala's Gentle Spirit, in which gloomy paint on plaster images portrays the suffocating atmosphere of a home inhabited by a frail woman and a domineering man. Some follow a more-or-less traditional narrative line, such as “Club of the Discarded,” in which Jiri Barta uses stop-motion animation to bring to life a warehouse of dotty antique mannequins who find their routines disrupted by a gang of newer, hipper, rowdier mannequins, and Pedro Serrazina's “The Story of the Cat and the Moon,” in which fluid black-and-white drawings relate a fable of a feline's enduring desire for the moon. The rest waver between the two, with Julie Zammarchi's “Ape” offering a combative husband and wife sharing a meal of cooked monkey, with drawings that morph from a roughly natural depiction of the scene into heavily symbolic representations of the couple's underlying psychological states, and Suzan Pitt's “Joy Street” portraying naturalistic images of a suicidally despondent woman contrasted with cartoony scenes of a comically anthropomorphic mouse. The works are so radically different in style and mood that the change from cartoon to cartoon is often jarring. And yet it isn't true that they have nothing in common. Besides an obvious sense of deeply personal creative vision and craftsmanship in committing it to film, these animated shorts share a somewhat melancholic spirit, a sense of emptiness and a yearning to fill it. This then is a parade of outsiders, the dispossessed, the hungry. For graphic elegance and eloquence in expressing this, it's hard to top Serrazina's fable, which flows from one stark image to another as exquisitely and enigmatically as the waves of a dark sea. But all the works exude something of this wistfulness. Maybe a more fitting title for this feature would have been Cartoon Melancholia? Cartoon Bleu? Not as commercial, perhaps, but then this is hardly an anthology of commercial animation.