BACK TO 3RD SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ANIMATION FESTIVAL

Are we the masters of our own destinies? Does your answer depend on whether or not you are an air-filled cell on a sheet of plastic? Arthur Metcalf’s Fantaisie in Bubblewrap might help you to formulate an answer. Some wrestle with their baser desires, as do the characters in Chainsaw, Dennis Tupicoff’s stunningly bleak look at fidelity, and Signe Baumane’s notorious and funny excavation of her past trysts in the Teat Beat of Sex series. One might think The Control Master would shed light on the issue, but Run Wrake’s science fiction/comic book piece—commissioned by design firm Veer—leaves more questions than answers. In the end the characters presented here might be constrained by inertia (as in Johnny Kelly’s hand drawn film he almost didn’t finish, Procrastination) or fate (as in Ivana Sebestová’s melodramatic cutout style film about kismet and fame, Four), but like the inhabitants of Claudius Gentietta and Frank Braun’s The Cable Car, dangling from a thin wire, they are all in it together.

The Cable Car (Claudius Gentietta, Frank Braun, Switzerland, 7 min); Chainsaw (Dennis Tupicoff, Australia, 24 min); A Child’s Metaphysics (Koji Yamamura, Japan, 9 min); The Control Master (Run Wrake, England, 7 min); Fantaisie in Bubblewrap (Arthur Metcalf, USA,
4 min); Four (Ivana Sebestová, Slovak Republic, 16 min); Procrastination (Johnny Kelly, England, 5 min); Teat Beat of Sex: Episodes 8–11 (Signe Baumane, USA/Italy, 7 min)
(TRT 79 min)

November 15, 2008, 5:15 pm, Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema