Great short films are like windows on a ship. You look outside them, and you can see a tossing, furious sea, the ocean waves reaching up the porthole, submerging your perspective for an instant. Or you look out and see an endless night. Or glittering stars. Or a sunrise, the kind of sunrise you figure a person only sees once in their lives. No matter the view, it’s always fleeting. After all, you might get seasick, or you might be off to bed, so the ship window is only a temporary distraction.
Co-Culture editor Lisa Ströhm Winberg and I, Clement Obropta, have chosen a few films we loved from 2022—yes, we’re late, but this is MAYDAY magazine, not The New York Times… late, lukewarm takes are as good as steaming hot, right-out-of-the-oven ones. Some of these films are sunrises through the porthole, while others are turbulent seas. They’re all worth watching, of course.
AU REVOIR JÉRÔME!
Directors: Adam Sillard, Gabrielle Selnet and Chloé Farr
Sacred tones are playing as an army of ants opens the squeaky gates to paradise. The amazed Jérôme enters into eternity and is greeted by a sea of delicate white flowers. Not a single cloud in the vivid blue sky. While walking across the floral fields in awe Jérôme discovers a rotary dial phone and a telephone book on a table. He promptly opens the book and starts looking for the name of his past lover Maryline. The ringtones echo throughout heaven as Jérôme receives no reply. Upon the pre-recorded words “You have reached Maryline Pasquier… please leave a message after the tone,” the table grows legs and starts running. And so does Jérôme. With hurried steps he runs through the fields, gardens, and parties of paradise, all in search of his dearly departed Maryline.
Au Revoir Jérôme is a surreal tale about love that dies upon death. While Jérôme sprints into numerous versions of utopian delight, he meets several kind strangers, all of whom are eager to share gifts with him. One man gives him a hot dog, a sausage dog in a bun, who proves to be a great companion and snack. Eventually, Jérôme finds his love. She’s sitting on a park bench sipping wine while waiting for her Thai boxing class to start. But their reunion is far from sweet. For Jérôme it’s a punch in the gut as he learns that Maryline stayed truthful to their vow “until death do us part.” In paradise, she no longer loves him.
The film’s hand-drawn illustrations are colorful, surreal, and humorous, and the film has a strong sixties vibe reminiscent of illustrations by Heinz Edelmann and Peter Max. With a seductive and comedic visual language, in combination with bizarre dialogue and carefully crafted music, the creators of the film devise a style that’s all its own. As Jérôme runs through paradise, each of the places he visits has a unique visual aesthetic that marks each milestone on his journey. At the end of the film, Jérôme shatters into a thousand pieces, just like his heart. The ants are quick to put him back together, but as Jérôme walks, the pieces of him that remain fragile and hurt sound like clattering porcelain. Heartbreak in paradise has never been so beautifully told.
—LSW
Credit: AU REVOIR JÉRÔME!
Retrieved: https://www.gobelins-school.com/actualites/au-revoir-jerome-graduation-short-film-2021
BACKROOMS
Director: Kane Parsons
Watch Backrooms Here
If Au Revoir Jérôme depicts paradise, then Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is about hell. This contradicts most of the film’s vibe—its production design of endless corridors and suddenly, breathtakingly open spaces, eerily reverberating sound, and loneliness might more aptly evoke purgatory.
Backrooms is a tiny horror short that I’m sure you’re familiar with if you’re under 21 years of age or spend any amount of time on YouTube. The film follows a videographer sucked into a liminal space with his crummy camcorder, a labyrinth of rooms with Charlotte Perkins Gilman-styled wallpaper and seemingly no way out. The trend of YouTube videos like “you’re in a bathroom at a 2010 party” or “what it feels like to be awake at 4 am (playlist),” each hour long playlists rolling over eerily empty but familiar images like abandoned bathrooms or nighttime gas stations, started years before Backrooms, but the short hops on the Gen Z obsession with empty spaces and uncomfortable familiarity and turns it into a definitive work of modern horror.
Personally, I blame the demise of the American mall. The mall as a space for teens to gather and live freely has fallen out of favor since the 1980s and ’90s, and no amount of Stranger Things nostalgia seems to be able to resurrect it. Now, across the country, these memorials to consumerism and American excess have become ghost towns—standing liminal spaces—and that distinctly 21st century development in American society seems to have fueled our obsession with liminal spaces, including that of Backrooms.
The concept itself quickly grew far beyond its humble nine-minute short. Amateur animators have recreated “the backrooms” in Blender, as well as in various video games, and the short has spawned dozens of sequels, imitators, parodies, and even tie-in video games of its own. Walking through empty corridors (and sometimes being chased by whatever horrors lurk around the corner) has never been so scary, or so fun.
—CTO
HAULOUT
Directors: Maxim Arbugaev and Evgenia Arbugaeva
Watch Haulout Here
There is something deeply romantic about the edge of the world. Free from civilization, with all its honking cars, loud people, police sirens, relentless noise, and LCD advertising, the arctic expanse seems like the most idyllic place on Earth. Haulout challenges that idea while deepening the mystery and tragedy of the arctic.
The film, a nonfiction doc up for a short film prize at the Oscars, was released by The New Yorker. On the magazine’s website, the short has a (characteristically, for The New Yorker) overlong, boring name: Haulout: Melting Sea Ice Pushes Walruses to the Brink. That the site gives its shorts overly literal subtitles like this is probably due to SEO reasons, but you should know as little as possible going into Haulout. To say it’s even about walruses is to say too much. Really, it centers on a Russian researcher, Maxim Chakilev, observing natural phenomena in the cold, windy expanse, on the beaches of Cape Serdtse-Kamen. It’s a vital film for its loneliness, for the environmental anxieties simmering under the surface. Many of us won’t get a chance to even experience the parts of the planet most heavily affected by climate change. Haulout is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see where the world ends, and how it’s ending.
—CTO
THE LEGEND OF PIPI and FUELLED
Director: Julia Schoel and Birgit Uhlig; and Michelle Hao, Fawn Chan, Subin Jang, Starlyn Lu, Younghak Jang, Jisoo Kim, Georgia Quinn, Emily Xu Eido Hayashi, Daniel Blake, Catherine Ivanhoff, and Aroona Khiani
Watch The Legend of Pipi Here
Animated cat short films are one of the best subgenres of short films. In fact, it’s practically why the medium was invented. The Legend of Pipi and Fuelled are each huge successes on YouTube, where they originally premiered. Fuelled has over 7.7 million views, while The Legend of Pipi is sitting at 6.1 million. Fuelled is a college project, from Ontario’s Sheridan College. (It’s actually from December 2021, but we can fudge the dates a bit here, both because there are no formal rules for this short film roundup and also because we get to talk about a short film with animated cats.) The Legend of Pipi is from a 23-year-old animator. Both films make me feel old. And though I like The Legend of Pipi and find that it has far more depth, whimsy, and heart than Fuelled, I’m immensely awestruck by both of these teams of filmmakers.
In the wide world of animated cat short films, The Legend of Pipi stands out as an epic fantasy story. Pipi, the tiny kitty who wants to be a heroic knight, embarks on a quest across the kingdom to save a damsel in distress. All Pipi has is a scroll with her picture on it, a little dagger, and a horse-cat that immediately abandons him. Pipi (pronounced “peepee”) has the best world-building since Double King, with a wild, anarchic medieval world of cats and other small critters. Pipi himself looks like the cat from that Pixar short Kitbull, only Pipi slays demons and fights dragons, which is much cooler than anything Pixar does in its shorts nowadays. Pipi is a delightful protagonist, too. He’s so committed to rescuing this one specific princess that he ignores the numerous other princesses he comes across trying to find her. Also, he’s just so damn cute, and I adore his chipped ear and his three-bean hands.
On an animation level, the entire story works without any dialogue at all. (Though there is dialogue, thanks to opening storybook narration from a literal lion king as he lays out Pipi’s quest.) The plot is clearly communicated through clever transitions, vibrant facial animations, and Pipi’s bedraggled mania as he runs, digs, and scrambles from one boss fight to the next. The only catch with Pipi is that I don’t actually think the filmmakers like cats. Directors Julia Schoel and Birgit Uhlig make sure Pipi gets the shit kicked out of him. One cat is grotesquely murdered before the film begins, and countless more are barbecued by a dragon in the end credits. Pipi’s quest really only brings misery and flaming torment to the kingdom he was adventuring in service of. But I guess that’s par for the species—my cat, for instance, steals sausages when I’m not looking and has tried to jump out the window. We live on the third floor. Obviously, she’s lost her open window privileges.
Fuelled is my girlfriend’s favorite between the two cat shorts, and I would be remiss to not give it a shout-out. Far more serious than the light and giddily violent Pipi, Fuelled is a surprisingly dark drama about a mother out for revenge after a wolf kills her husband. Fuelled, unlike Pipi, doesn’t have any dialogue, but the story is much more labored. Perhaps it’s the heavy themes, or perhaps it’s the attempt to ground the story in psychological realism. Trauma in Fuelled makes the already-small kitty seem more feeble, more powerless. Both Fuelled and Pipi, also, are concerned with the cycle of violence. However, whereas Fuelled is very bummed out about how one cat’s quest for revenge causes her to destroy a gas station and murder a pig, Pipi is overjoyed that its hero is a little serial killer.
In any case, Fuelled is an incredibly impressive student film. Unlike Pipi, it struggles to tell its story through visuals alone, relying on potent flashbacks and obvious rhymes and symmetry to get its point across. Confusingly, when we see the aftermath of the wolf killing the cat’s husband, we see that the wolf used a knife. Why didn’t the wolf just… you know, eat him? Or disembowel him with its claws and fangs? The film feels as though it’s a live-action short with Ctrl+F “humans” replace with “cats” and then the writers called it a day. Cats drive regular cars and purchase regular gasoline. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. Fuelled is a solid film with a good, heart wrenching message. It’s got sad cats galore. But maybe I prefer my cats to be goofy murderers rather than tortured avengers. The cat in Fuelled and Pipi both have chipped ears, though. I guess animators think cats with chipped ears are cuter and more lovable than those without?
—CTO
THABA YE
Directors: Leroy Le Roux , Merel Hamers, Hannah Judd, Mogau Kekana, Darya Batueva and Preetam Dhar
In feverish dreams, death is creeping. The demise is a she, a mountain with sharp teeth. If you walk too close to its darkness you´ll be swallowed whole, digested, and you have to let go. In the dreams and while awake, there is no way of escaping her gaping mouth, it’s the end of the show, soon sleep awaits peacefully below.
As Thuso is getting sicker his rest is filled with vivid dreams about a dark mountain with teeth. A mountain that scares his sister who is fighting for her brother´s survival. The love between the two children is strong and Thato refuses to let her brother die. But to keep Thuso alive is a challenging task, as the mountain that appears in his dreams is also right outside his window, with its darkness overshadowing the landscape. While Thato fears the mountain and the power it holds, her brother has understood his destiny. In order to save her brother, Thato has to face her fears, and she carries her brother up the mountain.
Thaba Ye is a tale of love, fear, acceptance and loss. The short film beautifully portrays the strong bond between two siblings, who together choose to look death straight in the eye, while never failing to support each other. As the enigmatic mountain draws inspiration from the legends of the Sepedi people, the mountain itself becomes a character, a big monster with teeth. In the legends of the Sepedi people, who live in the remote parts of South Africa, it is said that a mountain in the local area takes anyone who is foolish enough to walk close to it.
The film’s illustrations reflect the story’s strong emotions. Soft colors contrast a dark background, while the characters become mesmerizing as they are lit with a glowing light. The story is gently told with a strong focus on the depth and development of the characters. Traced over the film is a wonderful song that tells the mountain legend of the Sepedi people. It’s difficult to evoke deep emotions with a playtime of only seven minutes, but Thaba Ye is something special. The story, the visuals and the music manage to create a world where eventually even death seems as gentle and caring as the love between Thuso and Thato.
—LSW
Credit: THABA YE
Retrieved: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt25395608/