SXSW Film Reviews

Animated Shorts

The Animated Shorts program begins with Jonathan Ostos Yaber's "La Nostalgia del Sr. Alambre," a deft blend of comedy, pathos, and the grotesque that sets the tone for the program. The same spirit's there in "Bygone Behemoth," Harry Chaskin's stop-motion parable about a past-his-prime movie monster, and in "The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Burger," a self-explanatory Bill Plympton short that updates his signature style to colorful effect. Plympton's influence is evident in Peter Ahern's "Down to the Bone," a hilarious one-note gross-out (in this case, that's not a bad thing). Lengthier shorts have more space to stretch: The fluid CGI of James Cunningham's "Poppy," in which two World War I grunts stumble upon an infant, bypasses the uncanny valley with stylized design and real emotion; Sol Friedman's "Junko's Shamisen" breathlessly combines actors, armatures, and hand-drawn art; and Jeff Drew's "One Square Mile of Earth" turns an Altman-esque eye to a hipster tiki dive that's a real zoo.