Film Review: Optimus Prime: Awakening

'Til All Are One

The decision to kill off Optimus Prime, way back in 1986, to clear young boys’ minds’ mental space for shiny new toys in The Transformers: the Movie was infamously a massive imbroglio for Hasbro. The corporate big shots had succeeded in selling thousands of toys, themselves jerry-rigged into a brand and a story, fronted by a cartoon and a comic, that was cobbled together from multiple Japanese toylines which were discovered at a trade fair by a Holocaust survivor who would go on to invent the type of camera used to televise poker tournaments. They had created brand loyalty through the fiction they viewed as ephemera, through the voice acting talents of the likes of Frank Welker, Chris Latta, and of course the late and great Peter Cullen, who as Optimus Prime was a surrogate father figure for a generation of latchkey kids.

Hasbro did not think that the decision to kill Optimus Prime, and many other Autobots and Decepticons, in the 1986 film would lead to any controversy. Instead, children were devastated, as their father was felled in battle right before their eyes, and flickered out on his deathbed in front of new characters-cum-toys, an audience surrogate, and a single character from the cartoon. Back then, Hasbro was shocked to find out what the death of Optimus Prime meant. Now, after so many reboots of the franchise and so many deaths of so many versions of Optimus Prime, they have finally decided to think long and hard about what the death of Optimus Prime actually means. They do so in the short film Optimus Prime: Awakening, released in 2026 and shown after credits of the fortieth anniversary showings of The Transformers: the Movie.

You start in that operating room, surrounded by other Autobots, as Prime takes his last metaphorical breaths (do Transformers breathe?). He hands the Matrix of Leadership, the physical manifestation of his leadership and noble qualities, to Ultra Magnus, as he did in the movie, and slips away. From there, he wakes up in a Bardo-like realm where he is accosted by an otherworldly being about his choices, his responsibilities, and the wars that he had fought in.

This short film simply could not have been about the passing of Peter Cullen, as it was made before he died. I do, however, strongly believe that it is a rumination about the passage of time, as the brand has become middle aged as has its earliest fans. I am too young to have seen the original cartoon on air; I grew up with the first Robots in Disguise and the subsequent Unicron Trilogy in the early 2000s, and so the Primes of my childhood were either Daniel Riordan or Gary Chalk. Nevertheless, I had a VHS tape of the 1986 film as well as a few Generation 1 episodes, so I also came to know Cullen as Prime. I am now months away from thirty.

One thing that has been noted about that early scene in this short film, that recreates the infamous death scene in the 1986 film, is that a character is missing. Daniel Witwicky, the human child who served as an audience surrogate, is gone, and I think this absence is the skeleton key to understanding the themes of the short film. In the original show and the 1986 movie, the viewer is assumed to be a child, and is invited to view the show and film through the eyes of a child, where the idea that transforming robots having brought their bitter civil war to Earth is an exciting, new thing. Not so in this short film, made forty years later. This new production literally starts with the audience seeing Ultra Magnus, Hot Rod, Arcee, Kup, Springer, and Perceptor through the actual eyes of Optimus Prime. The audience is now assumed not to be a child, but older, having experienced all the wars of Cybertron, and having experienced the suffering and joys of a life long lived.

In this bardo, Optimus Prime is faced with an angry being who makes a terrible accusation: Optimus Prime, through his dedication to the idea that freedom is the right of all sentient beings and his love for his friends, has been the very being that has kept the wars of Cybertron raging for millennia. Furthermore, he argues that Prime has not died only once, but that other forms of him will die several more times for his friends in different realities, likewise keeping these wars raging, the suffering continuing, the death toll ever rising. The One, as it is called, is making the most devastating possible accusation that Optimus Prime has faced: he has fought for nothing, and that his death is meaningless. He is telling Prime to give up his struggle, and Prime cannot help but bristle at the accusation.

Prime is then attacked by old foes: Soundwave, Starscream, the Insecticons. He fights them on a blasted asteroid under the light of a black hole (which is very significant - more on that later), and then seems to meet an ally: Bumblebee, perhaps the friendliest of the earliest Autobots. But this is not the case, as Bumblebee denounces Prime’s role in continuing the Cybertronian wars and shows a Decepticon symbol on him, and joins with Prime’s pursuers before they all combine into a larger, angrier form of Bumblebee.

Those who are fans of the franchise and have been following its recent comics will have noticed something about this scene: that black hole looming above the battlefield is the Sacred Ring from Void Rivals, one of the comic series that shares a universe (the Energon Universe, as it is called) with the ongoing Transformers title, as well as G. I. Joe and M. A. S. K (NOTE - fans of these titles, I am going to spoil the first two or three arcs of Void Rivals, so stop reading here if you are not there yet). The Sacred Ring is a black hole that contains Goliant, an ancient Quintesson weapon locked in the black hole by Zerta Trion, a Transformer fighting the Quintessons’ oppression of her people, and kept in there by a gigantic ring on which live two nations, Agorrians and Zertorians, who each control half of Goliant’s essence, and, having lost the details of their origins, fight each other pitilessly to keep him from emerging. In other words, these two peoples have been condemned to suffering and war because of the wars of the Transformers. An old war, fought by a literal cassette player and an old VW bug, is waged under the light of a new war, now told monthly in comic shops as we speak. From the beginning of the franchise to the present day, there is war between Cybertronians for our entertainment.

Let’s go back to the notion that the short film is inviting us to see ourselves in Optimus Prime. Optimus Prime, at the end of his last battle, is asked to give up fighting, to give up the Matrix of Leadership, and to accept his own culpability in suffering. He is attacked by old enemies in the shadow of a war that is ancient in-universe and very new in our own. This then raises questions: what are we, and by extension old Transformers fans, fighting? What are we being asked to give up? What are we supposed to accept? What are we suffering from?

Old Transformers fans like myself went to 40th anniversary showings of the 1986 movie out of nostalgia. ‘Nostalgia,’ as a word broken down into its Greek roots, is the pain of homecoming. There are two parts of this whole process, and therefore the decision to watch a film we loved as children as adults: a love, and a pain.

Let’s put that in the metaphor invited by the short film. We, through Prime, are being asked to give up fighting, to give up the infliction and the creation of pain and suffering. We are being asked, on some level, to move on. We, like Prime, are being attacked by memories of the past that have been hostile to us, as well as a memory of the past that seemed friendly but is now hostile. Those two have merged into something wearing the accoutrements of the old, the combined Bumblebee and Decepticons, and they are assailing us with grief, under the shadow of the grief we feel to this very day. The forces fighting Prime are the pain of aging, the pain of the loss of innocence, but also the pain of a loss of purpose. Soldiers who return home have sometimes talked of missing the front, as the front gave them an immediate purpose and, in a way, a simple existence. The One is trying to impress upon Prime that his war is over, and from there that our internal struggle between living in the present and looking mournfully at the past must likewise end.

The short film continues, as Prime is sent to battles on Earth and on Cybertron. On Earth, he is helpless to stop Unicron. On Cybertron, he fights valiantly alongside Bumblebee against Megatron, his greatest enemy. It is the brief sequence on Earth that makes the invited metaphor even more obvious; the damages of something he cannot stop begins to strip away the metal on his hand, revealing under that a human hand. If we are Prime, we are fighting aging, something we cannot stop, and having the self-conception we built for ourselves as children ripped away, revealing us humans, weak and vulnerable to the world around us.

Then, on Cybertron, Prime is almost killed by Megatron, but is saved by his ally Bumblebee. He then almost kills Megatron, but relents at the last moment. He gives up the Matrix by throwing it away, and walks into a shining doorway leading to points unknown. Megatron, a Decepticon, is our desire to return to the past, that much is clear. What does Bumblebee represent? He is an ally, a good thing that is nevertheless capable of turning evil. Bumblebee, here, is the love for something in our past that makes us want to undertake a homecoming. He is the attachment that was born in our childhood. He is the good part, the sweet part, of nostalgia, while Megatron is the evil, bitter part. But, ultimately, this is a desire to let childish things be childish, to let things remain in the past. He is the ‘adult’ part of our brains that is telling us to put down our toys and leave the good memories as memories.

But Optimus does not want to kill Megatron, and the film is telling us not merely to give up nostalgia as a whole. The film is telling us to move beyond this struggle between the desire to return to the past, and the desire to simply leave a memory as a memory. What it does not say is where Optimus went. It does let the metaphor walk through that doorway, and leave us in the theater.

We submitted to nostalgia by going to the theater to watch a film from our childhoods. What, according to this film, should we do? Certainly the answer is not to give up on Transformers. Firstly, Hasbro and TakaraTomy would never allow that and never would want that. We are invited to continue engaging with Transformers as a franchise, but how?

I will confess to having gotten back into Transformers only within the past year, and as such have not watched and read every single new piece of fiction in the franchise, let alone stuff from before I was born. There is a lot of Transformers. But I think I can detect what the logical conclusion is here, and will demonstrate it with another beloved franchise of which I am a devotee: Star Wars.

An adult Star Wars fan, nostalgic for their childhood when the franchise was new to them, is caught in a struggle between the desire to leave it in the past, to put away childish things, and to struggle with what the loss of that newness means. You are older, pining for what you felt as a child, while acutely feeling the pain that that child no longer exists. You can give up what you love, or you can rage at our own mortality and thereby try to restore something that never really existed. Or, you can take a third option: to learn to appreciate the old stories with adult eyes. You will see the flaws, the stereotypes and the silly acting and the wooden lines, but you will also appreciate in Star Wars the commentary on imperialism and democracy. The proper resolution of the great conflict of nostalgia is Andor, a respect for the old stories bolstered with a respect for where it fits in the adult world, an appreciation that these stories are of the world, created by humans, rather than falling in our laps out of nowhere.

That resolution of the tension inherent in nostalgia is the resolution of the conflict within us, the resolution of the struggle between Optimus Prime and the One. He has given up his desire to return to his glory days, and his desire to rage against their ending. He has ascended to a higher realm, a higher discourse, and will become part of the One. The Autobot rallying cry is ‘til all our one,’ and that rallying cry is also a cry of mourning. It is a cry of loss, and an exhortation forward. As Optimus Prime joins the One, we are invited to rejoin the world, a world with Transformers in it, but also with ourselves in it, with us and the franchise and the world all inextricably linked. Giving up the struggles of nostalgia does not mean giving up what we loved, or giving up love itself. It is, rather, a higher form of love, a love of reality rather than a construct, a love that can accept that a cartoon thrown together to sell toys, written by freelancers who didn’t think much of it, and containing some hideous anti-Arab racism, can nevertheless bring good things into the world, things worth loving.

In his book Anatomy of Criticism, the great literary critic Northrop Frye argues that a comedy ends with the integration of the protagonist into society, as opposed to tragedy, which ends with the total separation of the protagonist from society. With the themes of moving on, one would be tempted to call this film a tragedy, as there is separation of Prime from what gave him meaning. But the Autobots fight until the day that all are one, and he has joined the One. There is, in a way, a happy ending. He has become what he fought for. We, likewise, can join the world of which our love is part, and create a more durable, more formidable love in the process. We can love what we love for what it is, and not what we believe it to be. We can face the world, having used our love to motivate us to be better people, to be strong enough to be gentle. It is the proper use of love.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

Festival View: Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting

There is a look to genre short films. You expect a DIYness, and a high contrast shooting. I see hundreds of them a year, so when something bucks the trend, I know I am watching something special. 

Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting is one of the most beautiful short films I have ever seen, with effects that are on-par with Hollywood’s best, and a story that is equal parts heartbreaking and breathtaking. 

The story is this; in an alternate Depression era, a mother, Selma, and her daughter, Em, are griffin hunters, the most significant ritual of their ancestors. The two have a different point of view on the griffins. Selma is of the tradition, while Em is far less staunch in her desire to continue it, but if it’s gonna happen, she wants a big score. 

If you’re thinking this is a lot like the 1930s in many ways, you’re absolutely right. The Depression was an era of massive cultural and societal change. The young, those who would be fighting in or dealing with the impact of, World War II in a decade, were coming to grips with the idea that their future was likely to be worse than their parent’s past. The way mother and daughter interact with one another shows the difference between those upon whom the Depression landed fully, and those that came up through it. Selma is simply happy to have something, Em wants different, if not necessarily better. 

Something that is interesting is in the writing process; they viewed the griffins as co-stars. That is demonstrated not only through the way that the characters interact with them, but how they interact with each other about them. Selma sees their role as important, and they must do right by the beasts as well as themselves. Em doesn’t think the ritual is doing right by the griffins at all, but seems to want to do ti right.  

There is an interaction with wood nymphs that shows Em’s still a child, even if she’s saying things that indicate her maturity, at least unto herself. The inclusion of the wood nymphs does a lot of work in establishing the world as more than simply the humans and the griffins, which in the weeks since I watched it for the last time, has made me wonder what else is out there. 

I can talk about the mythological connections between the griffins and Christian iconography, about how that plays with the new religious movements of the 1930s, about the nymph as a signifier for youth, beauty, nature, all of which are embodied by Em. It’s all there, and I chewed on this for days and days, watching it a half-dozen times during programming, and then in the weeks after the festival where it was incredibly well-received. 

But the thing that hit me was the look. 

Let’s start with the griffins. 

I was 18 when Jurassic Park was released. I remember sitting in the theatre, it was the morning of my high school graduation, and seeing the first dinosaurs appear and just being incredibly stunned by the realism. Even back then, I knew computer graphics, had seen SIGGRAPH video compilations, and this was better than anything I’d ever seen. 

The griffins were at that same level, only now, with decades of advancement, improvement, this was easily the best fantastical animal I’ve ever seen on screen. They are realistic in a way that not only brings them to life, but also makes everything around them seem more realistic, adding an almost Dorothea Lang sense to the action, and that adds a sense of pathos. It is incredible what effects can do when they are integrated into the story instead of being illustrative. 

The black and white cinematography is utterly clean, perfected graded, and insanely precise. It may seem as if it was chosen because of the timeframe, and the director has said as much, but it also did something that no one may have seen in the process. It draws out sorrow. There is a natural bleakness to black and white in this age of the hyper-colored cinema experience. What filmmakers are starting to realize is that is it not merely the setting that is portrayed through the color palette, but the emotional signifier. This, actually, is a concept that dates back to German Expressionism, but it has often been buried under decades of most contemporary film criticism. 

This entire story deserves to be played by fine actors, and this is where Semla & Em Go Griffin Hunting gets it so right that it hurts. Selma is played by Pollyanna McIntosh. You may recognise her from The Walking Dead or Vikings. She also directed the exceptional short Quicksand. There are few genre actors today who naturally inhabit their characters as McIntosh, and I can not express how she manages to play the fantastical and the Depression era equally well. Em, played by Milly Shapiro of Broadway's Matilda and the horror flick Heredity, hits every note hard. The little softness to her performance allows the breaking of the tension, and it makes the hard hit harder, smarter. 

I can’t recommend this film enough. It’s won more awards that I can count and has played dozens of festivals. I hope it’ll get a general release of some-sort, but who knows. Shorts are still hard to find after they’ve run through their festival life.  

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POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: Matti Like

There is a long history of music videos commenting on the history of film. Welcome to the Jungle and Dancing on the Ceiling come to mind. There is a long history of genre music videos. The Blackeyed Peas and Janelle Monae play there. There is a long history of genre music videos commenting on the history of film, like Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight Tonight fits that perfectly. The Italian music video Matti Like, a wonderful video that played at Cinequest in 2026, is one of the best of all those I’ve seen.

Let me start with the basic idea: it’s been 50 years since Young Frankenstein was released and director/songwriter Federico Cavallini has decided an homage was due. Not only an homage to the original masterpiece, but a fan and funky short film that plays in the music video form. The closest thing I can think of is the Paula Abdul classic Rush, Rush with Keanu Reeves that plays with the Rebel Without a Cause story within the music video form without making the song about it at all.

The thing is that it’s not a shot-for-shot re-make, for one thing it’s only 4 minutes long, and it tells another story within the visual aesthetic that defined Mel Brooks’ genius work, while also nodding the head at the classic Universal Frankenstein in much the same way that Brooks did... mostly.  It’s gorgeous, but I tend to think that anything playing in the realm of the classic high-contrast, Expressionist stuff of Arthur Edason deserves positive attention! The look works, and Director of Photography Rui Dias deserves a lot of the credit.  

To really make good understanding of a music video, one must find the appreciable portions of both the music and the video. Now, the song is written and performed by Cavallini, who is one of a growing number of musicians also making their own videos (Kate Bush’s Little Shrew played Cinequest this year, for example) and it’s a fun little bop. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d hear as a mid-pack Eurovision entry from a middle-European country. The song is sweet, but the video is even better.

The idea is pretty much that the Frankenstein that is created (and it is named Frankenstein, just like an astronomer gets to name an asteroid after themselves!) is a woman without the neck bolts or the scars (or the vegetal appearance of Charles Ogle’s first monster in 1910) and she goes on to become an influencer and when the villagers storm the castle, she turns their fear-filled rage into a sweet castle dance party.

Now, let me break this down in a weird way; this is a love story about filmmakers and Mel Brooks.

If you wanted to pay homage to Mel, typically you’d choose Spaceballs or The Producers, but Young Frankenstein is something even more special; it’s Mel’s unseen hand. It is exactly the movie that Mel Brooks could do that exposed his very real love of classic literature (he apparently once wrote a script, very early on, for a Golem picture) and an understanding of the genre film and how its roots mingle with comedy. Don’t believe me?  Look at the evolution of humor and genre fiction magazines. They mirror each other, though a big part of that is the general advance of printing technologies. He is tying so many of the moments and characters that populated 1930s genre film and amped them up in an incredibly intelligent way. The greatest example of why it's about the unseen hand is that he's not in it, and it's working in a field where he was not well known. While his hand (and face) is absolutely seen in the comedy science fiction masterpiece Spaceballs, in Young Frankenstein he was working more slyly. 

Brooks wasn’t just making a funny science fiction film based on a horror film (that's another debate that needs to be had; remember, there was no Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation to require that debate at the time), but a specific reference to the way that 1930s science fiction worked.  The way that he approached the material, and especially the famed Me and My Shadow performance, which was exactly the kind of thing you'd see in 1930s and 40s MGM flicks, is entirely based on one of Mel’s more impressive ideas: that comedy must reflect something back at the viewer. Brooks was not merely reflecting the individual film Frankenstein, but everything from The Island of Lost Souls, The Invisible Man, and Things to Come, and to a lesser degree Laurel and Hardy, the Keystone Cops, Buster Keaton and many many more. Brooks got all that, and incorporated the ideas without being showy when paying tribute. Cavallini works with that idea as well. Even when it breaks down into a modern dance party, headphoned DJ groovin' and all, it feels less like responding by presenting a music video dance party, but more like the ones you might have caught a glimpse of in 30s films… or perhaps more like retro-30s comedic things like the ending of The Imposters.

Now, here’s the ultimate question: is it genre?

Well, yes, or I put it in the wrong category at Cinequest. No matter how you slice it, it’s telling a science fiction story. It’s still giving us Frankenstein, just told in reflection of Young Frankenstein which just happens to be in reflection of 1930s genre film and fiction and so on. That is incredibly smart short filmmaking.

While there’s still some festival life in Matti Like, you can actually watch it on Vimeo! 

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Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: Fireflies in the Dusk

Comedy science fiction takes many forms. Thoughtful (if strange) scifi like Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension sits right there alongside the more intellectually down-market (but no less enjoyable) Teenagers from Outer Space. That comedy can exist across that spectrum isn’t shocking, but it’s surprising when something lives on both those lines at the same time.

And Fireflies in the Dusk has entered the chat.

The story is actually fairly simple: a 19th-century woman, Charlotte, has discovered that her desk has a temporal connection to a credenza in an ad agency office in 2025. Through letters exchanged via this unusual method, she has met her man Zack, technically a DudeBro, and she’s in love from the letters he’s been sending through the cabinet to her. When she is about to be forced to marry Cecil, a right-proper English gentleman, she chooses to go through the desk and be with her true love in 2025.

And, of course, Cecil follows.

The situation arises where Charlotte and Zack become a 21st-century couple. Cecil and Zach’s boss, Martin, also come together in a lovely sort of twist where Cecil discovers everything from GRINDR to Showgirls.

Of course, things go about in a strange and weird way, and the ending is a wonderful, twisted, utterly appropriate comedic finish.

The first thing is that everyone simply accepts the idea of a credenza that is a time portal, and that passing between the time periods. It’s an absolutely bizarre possibility, but everyone’s basically just “yeah, whatever” about it. That is what I love about science fiction comedy, when the unexpected becomes the completely blasé. That’s a key to genre acting, to be able to play off the strange and interact with a new reality in a natural way. Everyone in Fireflies in the Dusk manages that, with special note going to Emily Goss, whose work I’ve admired since I first saw her in the lovely horror film The House on Pine Street. She’s hilarious presenting a Charlotte that is utterly of her time and finds herself settling into her new one slightly uneasily. Her role at the end is a delightful twist in tone. She provides the backbone of the story.

But it’s Hale Appleman (probably best known for his role in The Magicians) as Cecil who absolutely kills every second on screen. He’s deadpan, but he delivers even lines like “Have you heard of poppers?” with nothing more than a late Victornian Gentleman’s droll. He’s great, and his boyfriend played with absolute dead-on comedic energy by Drew Droege (of Drunk History and Chloë Sevigny imitation YouTube videos) gives the flip side to the Zack-Charlotte relationship.

It’s a perfect little seventeen-minute experience that could be chock-full of fascinating ideas. If time travel is possible through household goods, exactly how many people take the journey? Is it a manufacturing glitch, or a planned feature?  Are there repercussions? What exactly is the mechanic that makes it possible?

Now, these questions exist, but that’s where the trick happens: we’re not here to have meaningful thoughts about time travel; we’re here to see what these two fish out of timestream’s water do when tossed into the present. It’s a relationship comedy, mixed with an office comedy, all set inside a time travel story. That takes doing, and in such a short timeframe, it’s a near miracle.

It’s a short with such good acting (including a lovely couple of pop-ups by the wonderful Amy Yasbeck) and smart writing, which makes for the fact that the biggest laughs at points are not exactly higher-than-middlebrow. The best of these, and they are pointedly funny, are delivered by the excellent Jade Catta-Pretta. She doesn’t have a huge role, but it’s remarkable.

So this is one of those wonderful shorts that don’t only live in one world, both within and without the story of the story, which is the story itself. It’s not as meta as that makes it sound, but it’s so much fun getting there, you wouldn’t mind even if it was. There are smart references to classics like Somewhere in Time (and the poster is a direct reference to it) and The Lake House, but it still feels fresh because, well, it's not super serious about things. Can't argue with that direction if you've got a cast with the comedic chops to pull it off.

You can find Fireflies in the Dusk on the festival circuit, and it’ll be playing Cinequest in March. You can view a trailer here.

Festival View: The Ugly Chickens

Every now and then, there’s a short that comes across my desk that plays on each and every one of my things. The Ugly Chickens happened to be one like that. Subtle science fiction? Yep. Extinct animals? Quite. An adaptation of Howard Waldrop? No doubt. Felicia Day? In the extreme!

Let me start with a thing that has always been true: the best science fiction short films are gentle science fiction. This is what draws the line with features for me. Yes, effect-driven features are really where it's at (and you can fight me on that!), but the shorter the short, the more based on our world the science fictional scenario should be. When I came across The Ugly Chickens, I knew that it was going to be the one that made me happiest.

The story of The Ugly Chickens is fairly simple: it’s the late 1970s in Texas, and an ornithology associate professor, Paula (played by Felicia Day) is running to her class when she bumps into a woman who sees the cover of her extinct birds book showing a dodo. She says she hadn’t seen ‘those ugly chickens’ in years, and tells the story of how her neighbors had raised them. She’s been obsessed with the dodo for a long time, and that led to an adventure to find the dodo, who she hopes is not as dead as everyone had thought. Her obsession leads her to travel to Louisiana, and she finds proof that there were dodos, but runs into a local, and that sets her off on another series of adventures at tremendous cost to herself. The way it plays out is both utterly satisfying and completely non-ambiguously a let-down.

I can remember reading the story in the late 1980s. It was so smart, and it dealt with my favorite: the dodo. They were a sweet, loving bird. They weren’t dumb, just trusting. I might have identified with them a bit too closely, and when I read a story where these noble creatures were present, well, I dove in. It’s helped by the fact that it was a Howard story as well. His writing went into so many other areas and there's always the Waldrop style I miss so much now that he’s gone. I was lucky enough to get to meet Howard a few times, and even did an exhibit based on his book The Texas-Israeli War of 1997. The Ugly Chickens was easily my favorite of all his stories.

The short switches the gender of the ornithologist to a woman, which, when played by Felicia Day, is a perfect choice. I maintain that Felicia is the finest genre actor in America today. Yes, it is a different and more specialized form of the art. It requires the ability to interact with a setting as much as other characters. It’s a multi-tier reaction process that Felicia has mastered in a way that few not named Christopher Lee have managed. She gets to roll through a series of emotional tones in a way that brings her natural charm to the front, while also not blowing out the story as it progresses.

The film is beautiful. The cinematography, handled by Alan Poon, is magnificent. It looks gorgeous, and it takes the changing setting, various time periods, and regional environments, and gives each a deliberate sense of place. Poon also handled the shooting of American Born Chinese, one of the best shot TV programs of the last decade. The entire look of the film plays with Howard’s tendency towards the rural, the backwaters and backwoods. There’s a certain Southern Gothic sense even to the classroom scene.

Now, is this an adaptation that isn’t exactly fully faithful to the story, but it absolutely maintains the spirit of the original. George R. R. Martin, one of the producers, reports that Howard saw an early cut of the picture before his passing and much approved. The script is really smart, and moves between beats without dwelling too much. This is actually more difficult than it sounds to maintain across 30 minutes and still give time for character development and Day’s amazing emoting.

I’ve programmed thousands of shorts, and there are a few which I knew would be winning awards from both audiences and the jury. The Ugly Chickens was absolutely one that I knew would, and I wasn’t wrong. At Cinequest, it won both, and I could not have been happier.

I hope that The Ugly Chickens gets a release along with the other short films that are being made from Howard’s stories, including Night of the Cooters and Mary Margaret Road Grader. 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Microreview: Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend

After surviving the worst of breakups, can you ever feel human again?

The usual list of vampire superpowers happens to match pretty well with the traits of abusive partners: they manipulate your mind, drain your lifeforce, change forms between a breathtaking charmer and a furious beast, leave you empty on the inside, and lack any reflection. They're practical devices for a writer who wants to explore the ways in which the dynamics of desire and surrender can end in disaster.

The Nebula short film Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, written by actress and philosopher Abigail Thorn, centers on a catch-up meeting over dinner between old friends: Fay, who chose to walk away from the tumultuous elite lifestyle involved in dating the literal Dracula and being part of his multinational fashion business; and Belladonna, the new girlfriend who takes a perverse pleasure in rubbing her status in Fay's face.

Except Fay can't be shamed by Belladonna's boasting. What's really happening is that Belladonna is desperate to confirm that Fay wants what she has. But Fay is past that, no longer under Dracula's spell, and hoping to shake Belladonna out of the harmful delusion she's willingly jumped into.

The tagline for Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend is "Bit people bite people," a recognizable allusion to the common refrain in trauma therapy circles, that describes the pattern by which cycles of abuse can perpetuate themselves. Here the effects of the vampiric bite are a metaphor for the lingering hurt that a victim can carry inside and sometimes inflict on others. During the dinner, Belladonna narrates with glee her adventures drinking the blood of unsuspecting strangers. Fay responds by mentioning that she's now in a healthy relationship built on respect, which Belladonna finds horrifyingly boring.

The emotional tone of the conversation is helpfully highlighted by changes in the illumination of the scene. Since this is a conversation between vampires, it's not beyond belief that the turbulent passions deployed in their clash of viewpoints would color the air around them. However, even for a film as brief as this, multiple repetitions of the same trick of lights can get tiresome.

Where the true brilliancy of the film lies isn't in its direction, but in its razor-sharp script. Thorn uses the trappings of vampire romance to comment on the many predations we bring upon each other: if we're sufficiently poisoned by inhumanity, we can drain our fellow humans of their time, or their money, or their devotion, or their labor, or their dignity. It took a massive effort for Fay to start healing from what Dracula did to her, and it's going to be at least as difficult to make Belladonna start to see the truth of her situation.

In fact, this dinner occurs at a delicate moment in Fay's new relationship, when she's just on the verge of reproducing Dracula's behavior. While Belladonna needs what Fay has to say about knowing when to escape from a toxic partner, Fay also needs to hear herself say it before she becomes what she struggled so hard to leave behind.

There's a conversation near the end, which on a superficial level may seem unrelated to the story, but which actually summarizes its theme. Fay explains her newly acquired smoking habit by enumerating the important moments in her day that are connected to each cigarette. When put like that, it has nothing to do with Dracula. But what the script is doing here is to repackage the strangeness of a supernatural premise and translate it into terms that human viewers can relate to. Cigarettes will eventually kill you, but they feel so good right now. Just like a lover that you know isn't good for you, that you know will break you into pieces, but for whose momentary delights you keep shutting down the part of your mind that screams warnings at you.

Dracula himself doesn't even make an appearance, but his dark shadow dominates the entire plot. It's amazing how a film made of just half an hour of dialogue can contain so much meaning, so much raw intensity. This short is a slap in the face by a well-meaning friend. It's a much-needed dose of tough love. It's a blunt reminder that we can turn into our own worst enemies when we get addicted to lying to ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Identiteaze

A cyberpunk allegory about the dangers of reducing human life to binary codes

Inspired by Legacy Russell's theory of glitch feminism as a deliberate embracing of anomaly as resistance to imposed norms, and by José Esteban Muñoz's theory of queer utopianism as a project that can be realized in the present by performing it, Jessie Earl's short film Identiteaze, released last week for streaming on Nebula, satirizes the corporate cooptation of human self-expression by proposing a cyberspace where blank digital avatars reclaim the agency to assert who they are outside of their designed parameters.

Identiteaze is set in a future where AdVent, a tech megacorporation, has created a virtual space for employees to live and work in. Passing mention of "physical asset storage" implies that their bodily functions are suspended while they exist in the VentiVerse. According to the in-universe promotional website, the VentiVerse is intended by the company's founder as a family. And it's precisely this prescribed family model that causes trouble for our protagonists.

We follow Aaron and Erin, who, strictly speaking, aren't people yet. They're created as options in a menu, two possible looks for an employee's digital avatar. In the VentiVerse, you're supposed to be either male or female. When one is selected, the other is deleted—consciousness and all. Because subtext is for cowards, this piece of exposition portrays the fundamental problem with imposed binaries: to conform is to kill a part of yourself. It is simultaneously betrayal and self-mutilation. The rules of the binary demand that you commit a profound violence against yourself in order to adopt one of the allowed values.

Normally, a movie shouldn't need a handbook to understand it, but "normal" is one of the concepts that Identiteaze calls into question. Earl has posted on BlueSky, with evident excitement over the completion of this project, enumerating instances of visual shorthand she resorted to and the respective meanings she used them for. Of course, this is optional reading; a movie ought to be able to speak for itself, but viewers unfamiliar with the symbolic conventions of queer cinema will find the thread illuminating.

Speaking of symbols, an interesting metaphor that the dialogues embed throughout the story is that of a symphony. Its tempo is set by the pace of a metronome. One can notice it hidden in the soundtrack: Tick. Tock. Male. Female. Either. Or. The logic of the VentiVerse is inextricably tied to the Law of the Excluded Middle. The company's founder casts himself as director of this symphony, and his motivational speeches invite users to dismiss the space in between Tick and Tock, to reject the melody it may suggest. The moral stance of Identiteaze inhabits this space in between and argues for the beauty of the atonal, undirected music that we could hear if only we eschewed the rigidity of the metronome.

Apart from this ever-present aural cue, the dehumanization inherent to binary codes is stated repeatedly, both in dialogue and by visual language. On this topic, Identiteaze wastes no time being subtle: in one scene, a middle manager recites a training script at our protagonists without looking up from the page, and doesn't start having a truly personal interaction with them until she finally notices them face to face and realizes that they've rejected the mandatory binary choice.

A later scene is no less straightforward, but it explores the movie's theme in an unexpected way. To correct the glitch in the system, a villain tries to manipulate the protagonists into betraying each other. The format of this coercion has a clear resemblance to the classic prisoner's dilemma. What makes this scene special is that it posits a prisoner's dilemma between the parts of one consciousness. Decision theory tell us that the rationally optimal solution to the prisoner's dilemma is for both parties to refuse to betray. Only cooperation wins, and that decision must begin with each individual refusing to betray themself.

A bonus treat for viewers of Identiteaze is the behind-the-scenes video posted by Earl on her YouTube channel. It's heartwarming to hear an indie creator describe the hard work and dedication it took to bring a piece of sincere art into the world. Earl explains that there's much more plot and lore already created behind Identiteaze, and depending on the short's success, she hopes to eventually turn it into the pilot of a TV series.

The theoretical grounding Earl drew from includes not only the two philosophers named above, but a handful of science fiction predecessors: Cube, Tron, The Matrix, Neuromancer and Severance are cited among the influences that informed Earl's creative process and left their imprint on the aesthetic, the worldbuilding, the dramatic stakes, the tone and the emotional message of Identiteaze.

With so much thought and so much love at the center of this movie, it feels almost mean to have to point out the growing pains that one sometimes finds in indie productions. While the set design is impressive (even more so once you learn from Earl's behind-the-scenes video how it was built), and the CGI effects are used in the right measure, and the frequent symmetrical shot composition is both aesthetically and thematically perfect, the sound quality isn't always ideal. The whole movie is supposed to take place in an abstract cyberspace, yet a background echo from recording in a semi-enclosed set persists in some scenes. In quick, scattered moments, the acting or the writing noticeable stumble, and there's a distracting distortion in the sound of many of the protagonists' ADR lines.

Still, for the minuscule budget it was made with, Identiteaze achieves a professional-level look. A movie as loaded with symbols as this one demands a very deliberate use of the camera, and Earl relies heavily, with a well developed eye, on the possibilities of shot composition and, especially, the shot/reverse shot technique to underscore the themes of duality and nonduality. This is the first Nebula production that has convinced me to subscribe to its streaming service, and the decision has certainly paid off.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Festival View - Sorry About Tomorrow

Sometimes, you can have good and fast...

 It is fully possible to make a movie in 48 hours; I’ve done it myself, in fact. It’s nigh-impossible to create a film that is layered, intelligent, and ambitious in 48 hours, but it does happen. In the case of Sorry About Tomorrow by Motke Dapp, well, it took slightly longer, but the end result was 100% the best science fiction film of any length I saw in 2013. 

The 48 Hour Film Project has been around since about 2001. It’s one-part contest, one-part internal filmmaking challenge to get filmmakers who tend to sit around talking about making movies to actually dedicate a weekend to making a movie. It grew and there are dozens of 48 Hour Film Project competitions in cities around the world these days. You’re given a list of musts – a genre, a line of dialogue, a character, and a prop. These can be interpreted by the filmmakers in a variety of ways. I started to see films come through our programming queue in 2003 or so, and they all tended to feel like they had been made in 48 hours. I did two films for the San Francisco 48 Hour Film Project, one where we won best script, and another where I was really just craft services. A few years later, I was one of the judges who helped determine the various winners and by that time, 2012, the quality of the films had gone from surprisingly good, to just plain whoa.

Now, in 2013, in Nashville, director Motke Dapp was given the genre of science fiction. Dapp, a working director who has become known for his comedy work, has an incredible eye for texture. As far as cinematography goes, texture imparts sensation to a scene. It’s an often underrated aspect of film shooting, but when you’ve got a director of photography who knows how to make things feel plastic (see Barbie: The Movie which did so incredibly without going the way of those 1990s Duracel commercials) or gritty (pretty much anyone who worked in Film Noir in the 1940s and 50s) they are going to leave a mark.

The story of the film is simple – Baldwin, a tinkerer, meets Emily, a scientist, at a party for Sen. Tom Tuckerbee (the required character for the project.) She’s working on time-travel and has discovered The Milk: a semi-synthetic substance that is the catalyst for time-travel. Baldwin is quickly smitten with Emily’s lab partner, Cricket, and as soon as he’s on the scene, he comes to a breakthrough that appears to be putting everything in motion, including the Baldwin-Cricket relationship. After they confirm that time travel works, and leads to some dicey territory, they start to be terrorized by time agents. 

All that is kinda prologue, though, as the film is really about Baldwin breaking up with Cricket. Well, he’s breaking up with the Cricket from 15 years in the past. 

The thing is, everything comes together. The story, kinda simple and kinda complex, bounces off the edges of over-down genre tropes in an incredibly smart, but sincere way. Yeah, we see time cops a lot, like in a personal fave Timecop, but here instead of winking at the idea, they are there and they are a menace, and they’re dealt with deftly. The characters are well-drawn, but each and every performance is played to a level of perfection, from John Ferguson’s Baldwin, who has the genre-acting chops that make folks like Sam Rockwell so affective, to Collen Helm’s Cricket, who somehow skirts maniac pixie dreamgirl portrayal in a role where many actors and directors would dive right in. 

But really, it’s Emmaline Weedman who absolutely steals the show. 

Child actors can be positioned a number of different ways. Smart writers and directors get that they can’t carry the weight of the film itself, performances like Natalie Portman in Leon, The Professional notwithstanding. They can, though, carry elements of the film and if they’re good at the thing, they can give weight to anything they deliver. Weedman delivers so damn hard, and while it’s only a minor twist in the scheme of things, it’s so well done, partly because it’s cleanly written, partly because it’s perfectly delivered.  That it’s followed by a great montage that 100% understands how you move a story towards a climax while telling the viewer what they should have been taking away from the entire piece only makes things that much better. 

Sorry About Tomorrow has shown all over the place, and you can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIO05LVPqKQ. We showed it at the Silicon Valley Science Fiction Short Film Festival and it won our big award. I was always shocked that it didn’t win the Nashville 48 Hour Film Project, but apparently it took a little bit longer than 48 hours, though it still won many of the individual awards, including for acting, which it certainly deserved. Still, this is a film that has all the layers of quality that a film in development for years would have trouble developing. 

Chris Garcia - Archivist, Zine Nerd, Curator, Pro Wrestling Enthusiast. 

@johnnyeponymous

Festival View - On the Matter of Time Travel in 2023

“Time travel is really hard to write about!” Dean Pelton, Community

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction short films since the very beginning. George Méliès did films about time travel; that’s how very it gets. Part of the reason is that the process of editing creates a form of narrative time travel, moving the viewer jerkily forward or backwards, completely unstuck in time like a Vonnegut character. In recent years, there have been an incredible amount of time travel shorts, including the Oscar-nominated short Time Freak. I’ve programmed dozens of time-travel shorts, from the absolutely blissful Multiverse Dating for Beginners to the darker Conversations with My Time-Traveling Future Self to the smart caper flick Heist, to a brilliant film made in 48 hours, Sorry About Tomorrow.

2023, though, saw Cinequest put three exceptional time travel shorts out there for all to enjoy!

The Problem with Time Travel

Mr. Chevesky of the International Brotherhood of Time Travel Workers has been sent to visit a woman in 2030 by the President of the World to ‘set her comfortably on the viranda,’ which is 2370 talk for eliminating her. He first arrives as a holographic phone call, while he’s waiting outside to come in and do the murder stuff. They actually have a very nice little chat that evolves into… well, that’s the play, and we wouldn’t want to give it away.

The film is satire, and it’s fun, and the pacing is great. The idea of the International Brotherhood of Time Travel Workers is great to see mentioned: instead of being a government agency that sends out the messenger, it’s a union! There’s a theme of ecologic catastrophe due to silica desiccant packets. I knew it all the time!

There’s smart comedy, and the acting is sly in a way I didn’t expect.

Creeper

Amy Acker is always great. She’s been around for a couple of decades and she’s appeared in a few shorts I’ve programmed over the years, including the hilarious The Lord of Catan. Though she’s not the star of Creeper, she adds a touch of gravitas that this short assuredly needed.

It’s not an overt time-traveling short, at least not at first. It reads like a stalker’s tale, but the single greatest use of time-traveling as a way to save the narrative of a film since Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure makes this a 100% certified time travel story.

But really, it’s a story about the dangers of families that don’t function and how the long-term effects can manifest in the present just as easily as in the future. It’s a fascinating examination of that idea, and its pacing is fantastic.

Plus, that one moment when they realise that time travel can literally save your life is just perfection.

Time Tourists

This one is a short from New Zealand, a country that has been making fantastic short films that I’ve shown in nearly every festival I’ve ever worked on. The story is simple, actually: a pair of travelers arrive at one of the most beautiful places in all the universe, a large inlet surrounded by mountains. It’s gorgeous, and that allows for all sorts of fun cinematography.

Oh yeah, the two folks are from the future, where the world has been befouled by us terrible humans.

The pair of them have a little flirting, but one of them is staying in the past for the long haul, and the other has his return ticket already punched.

It’s kinda a cross between a meet-cute and a missed connections, but the time travel plays a role that is both charming and heartbreaking. It’s only 6 minutes, but it packs in the emotional resonance without feeling like it’s trying to pack so much in.

So, what do they say about time travel in today’s festival film world?

A fair bit, actually. There’s the obvious, that time travel is still a totally valid form of science fiction to explore in the short form. In fact, while films like Bill & Ted’s and Looper and even 12 Monkeys certainly make a case for time travel in the feature film mode, the short form allows for things like causal loops and entropic ensnarement to be skillfully dodged, or explored without the sort of pedantic detail that so many feature films feel like they have the runtime to dig into. Two of the films Cinequest is showing this year explore the secondary effects of environmental destruction in the present, which is a classic for SF films of all sorts, but they see the future as being able to change all that, while accepting that humans never change their behavior no matter the certainty of the outcome of contemporary actions. We tend to think that we will change our behavior if only we can be shown the effects, but these stories speak contrary to that idea.

Which sounds a lot more dour than these films turn out to be. Creeper is a thriller. The Problem with Time Travel is a dark comedy. Time Tourists is a romance. This ability to explore different parts of the genre spectrum shows not only the malleability of time travel as a plot device, but its role as more of a setting, an idea Jay Lake and I would argue over for ages back in the day. This sort of flexibility is much easier to explore in less time, and that why I’m so glad that time travel has replaced zombies in genre short film festival submissions!

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: The 1 Up Fever

Sometimes, filmmakers really do manage to see the future

Film festival programming can be a vicious vocation.

It’s true, a lot of us fight, hard, for premieres. It’s a sad thing for me, as I’d love it if every film could show everywhere, but it’s usually the big players that end up with the big films, and the tiny folks, they get the the crumbs, usually a year or two old by the time they fall into our laps.

Now, there are few festivals smaller than the Silicon Valley Science Fiction Short Film Festival. In fact, we don’t have a full-time home. We tour, showing shorts wherever we can. Mostly, it’s at cons, sometimes at libraries, we’ve even projected on a sheet hung on a prominent Silicon Valley engineer’s garage door! We don’t do every year, in fact there’ve only been 8 editions since I founded it in 1999. Luckily, I get shorts from film friends I know through Cinequest or have met on the circuit, and those have buoyed us through the years.

So, it wouldn’t be the place you’d expect a North American primiere for a short that ends up playing around the world and making a buzz again a couple of years later when the world had moved along the path it envisioned and made it seem even more like the documentary it proposed to be! The film, The 1 Up Fever by director Silvia Dal Dosso was our one big win.

So, let us go back to the far-off year of 2013. It was a year like many others, only more so. The world had yet to experience the hellscape that begun in 2016, and Prince and David Bowie were both still alive.  I remember sitting down to work on screening for the festival and coming across a film that had graphics that harkened back to the 8-bit graphics of my all-time favorite gaming system. This film had hit the exact right set of eyes.

Honestly, I don’t think it would have mattered who’d seen it; it’s just so good it can’t be denied.

The film was delivered as a documentary, and not played for knowing laughs as in Arrested Development, The Office, or What We Do in the Shadows sort of way. It was played straight, a series of interviews inter-cut with action scenes of people, out in the world, playing an Augmented Reality game.

In the first segment of the film, a bunch of folks were running around Berlin which had been turned into a giant level of Super Mario Brothers. The graphics are straight out of the NES text-interludes. We see coins, just like those found in the Mario franchise, hanging in the air.

The concept that the ‘documentary’ was pitching was that a game added a layer of false reality where you could go through Berlin collecting coins by hitting the coins, which were virtual representations of literal amounts of the virtual currency Bitcoin. They would collect these by hitting them with their smartphones. If you got your phone taken away by a security guard after trespassing to collect coins, you lost your entire stash. They told the story largely through interviews that seemed 100% legitimate.

And that was the brilliant part, and why so many people were brought into the idea that this was an actual documentary. They spend a fair amount of time going over the mysterious origin of the game and make direct connections to the mysterious origins of the game. Those of us in the know about Bitcoin, and at that point cryptocurrency wasn’t a thing that made headlines, nor were there real cryptobros, though a few of the folks ‘interviewed’ for The 1 Up Fever would certain qualify as such before the term was coined.

What may be the most fascinating part of the piece – it’s all come to pass!

Several AR experiences existed at the time, though nothing at the level that the film presented. Things like the fascinating but glitchy Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary existed as a real-world based mobile AR experience, but they were few and far between, and technologically The 1 Up Fever was worlds ahead of any of the significant platforms. It showed a phone-based game, while many of the real world examples were based around special glasses (and I can’t be the only one who remembers and loved GoogleGlass, right?) or head-mounted helmet-style displays. The idea of using a phone for a real-world-based augmented reality game would become the standard following Niantic’s Ingress. It was still a teeny-tiny segment of the gaming world until a little game called Pokemon GO was released in 2015.

That’s when The 1 Up Fever got a massive up-tick in attention.

The short played various festivals in 2013 and 2014, then showed once in a while until about 2017, when it played not only fests, but also conferences. You latch on to that presentation model and you’re likely to play for a lot longer than the average festival run a short might enjoy. There was a renewed series of debates over the reality of the short, just as we had at our festival when we showed it at BayCon 2014. They played it brilliantly down the line, and it’s only been helped by the real world catching up to their vision. Even today, you’ll find folks asking what the name of the game is and wondering if it’s available in the App Store.

You can still see The 1 Up Fever on Vimeo, and if you’ve got the time, you really should. It’s the kind of sly, prescient sci-fi you really can enjoy while fitting it in with the world around you. Just like in the game...

 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: Fudgie Freddie

Creators and Creations are deeply tied, and sometimes it gets dark...

One of my all-time favorite musicals is 1990’s City of Angels. It’s an amazing story of a mystery writer and his detective creation. The story goes that the writer is watching his work being adapted into a film, and lo and behold, he hates it. The detective in the story that Stine is writing, Stone, is also disgusted with the way that Stine is writing the story and how it’s coming along. There’s a song, a masterful piece of lyricism by the great Cy Coleman and David Zippel, called “You’re Nothing Without Me” which is the declaration of the writer that his creation wouldn’t even be there if it weren’t for his writing him, and the creation saying that it is only his existence that has made his creator matter at all. This is, in essence, a battle of wills between God and Man, and they eventually reach détente. 

 

Let us flash-forward to a time called a little time called recently. I’m watching short films for Cinequest, and going over the database where the other viewers are rating movies as well. There was one title that I thought sounded fun: Fudgie Freddie. I have no great, grand reason to have thought that it would be a masterpiece; I actually hoped it might be something along the lines of a documentary detailing the life and times of the Carvel creatures: Cookie Puss, Fudgey the Whale, and Hug Me The Bear.  

I was wrong, but Fudgie Freddie was truly brilliant and more than a little terrifying. 

 

The story begins at the start of a live-stream. An animator, Vic, starring down the last hour of his crowd-funding push, is trying to drum up business. He’s no amateur, in fact, he’s previously created an absolute smash-hit of a creation: the sentient, Looney Toons-esque ice cream cone, Fudgie Freddie. The character has defined his whole career, but now, like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock on top of the world, he’s decided to push his creation over Reichenbach Falls and move forward with his passion project: a Star Trek-like science fiction animation that he knows will set the world on-fire! 

 

The world, it seems, is not so sure.

 

He streams and the fundraising is going poorly. So poorly, he’s having to call his mom to give more money. He really believes that this is the animation that will finally break him free of the spectre of Freddie that looms over everything he wants to do. He’s had this vision in his mind since he was six, and if it holds him so thoroughly, it will clearly have the same effect on the viewing audience, right. 

 

A viewing audience that really only wants more Fudgie Freddie. 

 

A well-heeled donor appears in the feed. They start asking for concessions towards the Fudgie Freddie character in the new creation. Our hero gives in, happily, then pushes back against the recommendations, but eventually relents. This brings in fast money, but also more and more requests for Freddie in the new series. He gives an inch; they demand an entire spaceship. As he gives in, our animator finds himself becoming more thoroughly tied to his earlier creation. It actually becomes a part of who he is. 

And not just metaphorically.

 

This is a fantasy short film, and it’s really a piece of body horror. The transformation of Vic’s vision of his work leads to a transformation of his corporeal reality. This is a literal transformation, and it’s super-creepy, but it’s also very painful to anyone who has worked on life-long passions only to find that they can not break away from their past. The idea that Fudgie Freddie is a part of Vic that he is trying to suppress is clear, and I think there’s a lot there to explore. Freddie is one of those early 2000s Flash-style silly animations (think Radiskull and Devil Doll or Homestar Runner) and one that’s clearly not particularly mature in nature. Vic tells us he created Freddie when he was 18, and now, he wants to bring that old vision to life instead of delving back into his sophomoric work on Freddie. He’s so determined to get this vision done that the early asks by his anonymous donor are done with joy and no questions. It’s only when they start to impinge on the vision that’s lived in his head for so long that he begins to push back. 

 

And, spoiler alert, he loses. 

 

The fact is creators deal with this constantly, and while we like to think that the removal of the studio from many of the most popular animation projects frees the creators from interference, it’s still not the case. Frequently, artists still have to try and drum up funds from people who want their vision represented in the projects their funding. Working with festivals, I’ve heard many of these stories, though none that would evolve into this sort of bodily transformation. 

 

We try and say that we are not our projects, that we hold healthy boundaries between our creations and ourselves. So many of us fail this, or at least play a version of Let’s Deny The Reality. Creators, especially those who have to stump to make their creations happen, often begin to live the gimmick. Those that make hard right turns out of those creations often fight against returning because they fear the frequent fate of returning to what they managed to break away from, to become what they were instead of what they want to be. Vic may recognize that he is far more mature than Fudgie Freddie, and we wants to express that, but he knows that if he turns back, he will become the monster he created. Again. 

 

And all of that, the deep thoughts, are only benefitted by direction, cinematography, and especially sound design that only amplifies every beat. The effects are clean, and fairly simple. The way it’s shot is claustrophobic, amping up the tension. The sound has a sort of disquieting unnatural resonance that it allows the ordinary sounds, the ring buzzing and the message arrival notifications, to feel as if they are intruders instead of the anticipated sounds of daily life.

 

The only acknowledgement to the outside world are a phone call and the text messages and money transfers that we see play out. In other words, the only world outside is completely mediated through one kind of screen or another. That message stuck with me, because it also speaks to the loneliness of Vic in particular and creators in general. In recent times, and especially during COVID’s early period, so many writers, artists, and especially animators, have lived reality. I can remember an early proponent of crowd-funding saying during a panel at LoneStarCon in 2013, ‘I didn’t see the sun for weeks on end, but at least I made my goal and then some.’ Sometimes, you must sacrifice vitamin D for cash. 

 

Fudgie Freddie is a great film, and when Cinequest returns to San Jose in August for the in-person festival, it’ll be playing in our Mindbenders program. You can likely find it playing more festivals as well, though it doesn’t appear on my recent searches. You can learn a bit more about the film, and the team behind it, at https://twitter.com/5sf and check out 5-Second Films (https://5secondfilms.com/) where director Joe Salmon and Brian Firenzi have both done a ton of great work!

 

Apparently, this is also a proof-of-concept for a feature film called Ice Cream Man, and if it can maintain the intellectual power and impressive technical filmmaking of the short, I’ll be sure to see it. 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View - Intense Science Fiction Short Films of 2023

In addition to being a nerd who lives and breathes zines and scifi goodness, I happen to be the co-head for Short Film Programming for the Cinequest film festival. That’s right, I get to watch a couple of thousand short films and choose a hundred or so to put on at the festival every year. It’s a fun job (so fun I’ve been doing it for 20 years even without being paid!) and I’ve been lucky enough to see some actors and filmmakers at a critical point in their careers and even help a few along the way.

Every year, there’s an unwritten theme that bubbles up from the best films. Some years, it’s a lightness, a visual aspect, or even just a technique. In 2022 and 2023, it was genre films that took on pretty big issues in a way that wasn’t lasers-and-dragons, but more near-to-home takes.

The best genre short films usually look like every other short film. Rarely is it the window dressing, the costumes or the sets or the effects, that set them apart from your average short. It’s the utter core of the concept. While films like Gattaca and Blade Runner drop you into a visual world that is clearly something else entirely, it’s the films that play in the world we know like Her and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that have always appealed to me. They look like now, with a few minor exceptions, but the very idea at the heart of them is someplace else.

That can easily be applied to the masterfully dark I XXXX My Sex Doll, which showed at Cinequest this year.

The idea boils down to this—the British government has noticed that the levels of domestic violence have increased to epidemic levels. Like all governmental programs of the 2020s, they decided to regulate all dating by the use of an app where you meet people virtually, and then if you’re deemed suitable, you can date in reality. That seems logical, no? I mean, aren’t governments always getting in the way of our personal relationships in various ways, and they’re often trying to figure out a way to make use of those cell phones we’re all carrying these days.

Now, with the law in place, a new need arose—sex dolls.

Now, these dolls are human-shaped androids, and they’re ultra-realistic. Their voices are modulated, and there are problems with the software, like any other banal technology, and there’s even a customer service line you can call, and our unnamed main character does just that.

And he has to make a return because his doll is broken.

Let me be exceptionally clear—this is a film about men being violent to women, and has a high potential for triggering and general discomfort. It’s a commentary on the violence that lives within many men, and how our current thinking that technology can solve our problems will always bump up against that violence itself. This story could be told as a satire, about how dumb legislative ideas can have unintended consequences, but this is almost 180 degrees away from that. This is blunt, in-your-face, brutal light-of-day stuff meant to slap you out of your assumptions, and about the inevitability of violence. In this world, it can not be destroyed, merely channeled, and here, it is a humanoid who pays that price.

And people know it.

It could easily be read as a condemnation of men, and that’s a valid reading, I think, but there’s also more to it. Our main character is vile, and is viewed as such, but only behind the scenes. Those that know talk, quietly, but they do nothing. How often have we heard that story about humans doing terrible things to other humans and the loudest comments we hear about it are barely amped beyond a whisper as a warning to a friend? When the target of the terror is non-human, there are more questions, of course, but also more self-justification, perhaps. Fay Beck raises all these questions, and they each made me incredibly uncomfortable every time I watched it. It is high cinema when you can manage that sort of effect in such a compact package; she manages it all within 10 minutes.

This is a story that is told with strong aesthetics, the camerawork is precise, and the acting falls in with the kind of genre acting we don’t see as much these days. It’s not subtle, but it’s also not only showy to the edges, never beyond. Every choice made here is meant to make you question why this happens, and after a while, you realise that your assumptions are probably wrong.

Thought-provoking SF like this happens in short films from time to time, but rarely is the landing punch of the content quite this visceral. It is literally hard to watch, though the production is incredibly easy on the eyes and ears. The banality of evil presented here is so utterly thorough that you feel as if it’s the message, but I see it as something that hits deeper. It’s somewhere between a call-out and a cautionary tale, and one that wounds deeply. I went into my first viewing not even knowing the name of the short or anything about it (we do largely blind viewing for programming) and as I passed through the film, I was deeply moved, angered, and made dark realisations that this is a story that Ballard would have understood, Dick would have conceived of, and Butler would have written, though only as a stat down an even darker road.

I XXXX My Sex Doll is still on its festival run but keep an eye open. You can hear director Fay Beck talk about the film for the Deep Fried Film Festival here.

Fast recommendations

AlieNation (trailer). This is a very good short film about the perils of border crossings. Also, there’s a monster, both literally and metaphorically. There’s a lot here to see that makes it a commentary on what we should and shouldn’t be doing with regard to immigration, but also about the view of the ‘other’ we encounter in extraordinary circumstances. It's another punch-to-the-gut short, but it's so well done that I watched it three times to absorb it fully. When you've got a pile of a couple of hundred films you've got to watch in a week, that's a big compliment.

BEBE AI (trailer). Two young people with Down syndrome want to adopt an AI baby in a strange future. They have to fight for it, and get assistance and find new troubles along the way. It’s both a heavy story that deals with the disposableness of people with disabilities, and a somehow heartwarming tale of perseverance. It has elements of A Handmaid's Tale, as well as commentary on the idea of brand control and identification. There are so many great layers to it that it demands your full attention.

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous