LIAF 2024: Agents of the Imagination
If you didn’t find yourself attending this year’s London International Animation Festival, perhaps we can fill in the gaps here at Skwigly. Many audience members attending the inaugural opening were pining deeply for the release of Julian Glander’s feature film. Boy’s Go To Jupiter delivered a satisfying and sugary hit of offbeat humour as we followed the film’s teenage protagonist Billy5000 (voiced by Jack Corbett) on a journey to find his place in an absurd universe.
Julian Glander’s feature film. Boy’s Go To Jupiter
In this alternate coming-of-age film, Billy5000 is motivated by a singular goal, to get paid. Absorbed in the gig-economy and its short-term rewards, Billy works as a food delivery boy for an app called Grubster. He traverses Glander’s somewhat edible landscapes on his self-balancing segway, all the while hot on his quest to make $5000 (a mantra he whispers to himself in unguarded moments). Glanders’ skill here is in making his wonderfully surreal worlds seem downright humdrum to the characters that inhabit them. He depicts a Florida filled with the disenchanted, the teenage dropouts and slackers, and yet, there is something nuanced and magical brewing beneath.
Billy befriends a cute donut-shaped alien (an ‘angel’) and is subsequently cast as the unlikely hero when he saves the creature from being captured by orange juice tycoon, Dr. Dolphin. Dolphin believes the creature will be a catalyst to enhance profits, due to some unknown mysterious power. Due to this encounter Billy is exposed to some underlyingly ruthless capitalist machinery. The $5000 goal become dulled, loses meaning. When Billy is invited to join the angel and its worm mother in their subterranean home it manifests like a pocket paradise in an otherwise cruel universe. This day-to-day universe is that of the ‘daily grind’, where perverse customers can pay you to chew up hotdogs for them. Billy must escape!
Elsewhere at LIAF, there were further ways to side-step a broken system. Three friends in Pelikan Blue, directed by László Csáki, find a loophole in 1990s Hungary. Csáki’s animated documentary depicts a pivotal time for Hungary; the iron curtain has just fallen, and travel is finally possible. Yet entrance into a capitalist system comes with a cost. First of all, the train tickets are far too expensive, especially for a younger person. Ákos, Petya, and Laci meet to conspire a method of international train-ticket forgery, all with the air of a teenage prank. What unfolds however is a punchy tale of civil disobedience spiralling into organised crime. The boys discover how to wipe train tickets with cleaning detergents and then re-enter the details to faraway destinations. They are able to feel something of the independence they were promised.
The story behind Csáki’s decision to make Pelikan Blue into an animated documentary is an intriguing one. The voice actors playing Ákos, Petya, Laci, and other characters are the real-life people in the story. This grew from Csáki recording archive interviews back in 2006. Intended originally to be used as research material, the filmmakers decided they liked the performances so much they should be carried forward. Some were concerned about revealing their true identity in the film, therefore adopting a cartoon guise was an elegant work-around. Csáki chooses an animation style reminiscent of Beavis and Butthead cartoons, (or perhaps for a younger viewer Netflix’s F for Family).
László Csáki’s animated documentary ‘Pelikan Blue’
Just as Csáki’s characters pursue freedom through their wild and illegal train rides, so does Billy5000. Billy carves out an aperture of freedom, a kind of fulfilment in a bounded world with his new worm family. As his worm spouse-to-be says “Maybe it’s not exactly what you were looking for”. But in this case, it is enough.
These two films are each from a wildly different time and space, and yet, the desire to escape one’s own time prevails. The current narrative brings little satisfaction for these characters. And so, the imagination must be engaged to resist it. This sensibility was underpinned in LIAF’s ‘Disrupting the Narrative’ programme, chaired by Osbert Parker. The collection of short films worked to disentangle existing realities, to offer new routes into deep-rooted issues.
Gisela Mulindwa’s film Start With A Place used cut-out collage and archival sound to tell a story of gentrification in South London. Mulindwa animates paper fragments under camera. These are slices of the city, a loose tapestry of psychic geography speaking to the homes and livelihoods lost, the London which has been transformed, replaced and forgotten. Similarly in High Street Repeat, directed by Osbert Parker, cut-out photographs of London shop fronts are manipulated and destroyed. As soon as a shop-front shutter had crumpled into view, there is another overlaid and replaced. This is where form meets function in filmmaking. Cut-out collage as a medium is analogous to a layering of histories, histories which seem disposable in an ever-fluctuating London. Parker and Mulindwa expertly draw these histories into focus, employing experimental techniques to tell their visual stories.
Barbara Cerro’s short ‘All Futures (Todos Los Futoros)’
Included in LIAF’s Being Human program this year was Barbara Cerro’s short All Futures (Todos Los Futoros) accompanied by an impressive score by Jacco Gardner. In this speculative epic, Cerro not only disrupts the narrative but decides to write it all over again. The film plays out as a kind of thought experiment: what would happen if humanity had the opportunity to start over? On the virgin planet, Somnum, all is silent, and night is eternal. That is until dozens of meteorites containing microorganisms light up the sky, penetrating the planet’s dark crust. The meteorites bring life to a dormant landscape. Yet life brings fire and with it, chaos. The humanoid figures which emerge from Cerro’s vision are set to make the same tragic errors, all over again. After a Prometheus-like discovery of fire the figures begin to wage war against one another.
These human flaws are perhaps an evolutionary birth right, or perhaps the follies of man have something to do with their anonymous god-creators. Various spaceships populate the sky, beaming traffic laden highways into existence. At a later point in the film however, these entities seem to lose interest in creation. Roads lead to nowhere, cars dropping off into deep chasms. God is dead.
The alien governors are not the only ones to become disillusioned. The humans in All Futures move into a frightening period of existentialism. Cerro depicts the figures to, at first, be engaged in an orgiastic frenzy of procreation. Later on, these practices lose momentum. The figures lie languidly on the ground next to one another, no longer stirred into sex and perhaps questioning their greater purpose.
Seen from above, audiences are invited to see humanity’s transgressions from a detached viewpoint. The human experience is concentrated into a symbolic formula, one that can be dropped into any space or time with essentially the same results. Cerro thus brings us into the shadowy realm of deterministic thought. Contrary to the first two films described in this article, All Futures does not seem to present an alternative, or even a possibility to escape a path once you have gone so far down it.
Whatever your philosophical stance, these animated films remain joined in their ability to enact the impossible. Animation (especially the independent kind) is a sure-fire agent of the imagination. When the world around us does not reflect an ideal we may turn to the fantastic, looking for answers. And what better place to do this then London International Animation Festival. (Roll on 2025!)