Short Film of the Month

[osprey_archer]

I watched a lot of great short films this month! I tried to winnow it down to three recommendations, but once I saw Kitbull I simply had to include it (I've already sent links to it to like five of my IRL friends) so I’m sort of cheating by bundling two films together on the grounds that they have the same director.

1. There’s a genre of short film - I’m not sure if it’s widespread in short films in general or if there’s just someone at Short of the Week who really likes it - that might be described as “A Family Grieves.” Generally speaking I am not a fan.

But Pepe Le Morse, a French animated film about a family going to their grandfather’s favorite beach to mourn his recent death, won me over. The animation is beautiful (the beach grasses!), the emotional tone is understated, and the film develops in a magical realism direction as strange and potentially dangerous and beautiful as the sea.

2. When I saw Greta Nash’s film Locker Room (a teenage girl in Australia discovers her male friends’ creepy group chat rating their female classmates; a thoughtful, sensitive picture of how thoughtless and insensitive adolescents can be) I liked it so much that I searched out her website, where I found Happy Dance, a short documentary about groups in China - mostly older women, but also some young mothers, a few men, really anyone who wants to come join them - which meet daily in neighborhood squares to dance.

It really is happy - just unabashedly happy. It’s so rare to see anything that happy these days.

3. Last but certainly not least! - Kitbull, the cutest thing you will see all week, in which a feral kitten that is basically a soot sprite with eyes and a tail befriends an abused pitbull and it is SO CUTE, YOU GUYS. SO CUTE. SO MANY FEELS.

Also this is the third Pixar short within the last year that has been directed by a woman and I am HOPING that this means that Pixar will soon have more women directing feature films… although the next two films on their docket are both directed by men, so clearly I shouldn’t get my hopes up too high.

Comments

[conuly]

Did you say Kitbull twice?

That's quite right to do, of course, just checking that it's intentional. (Also it made me CRY so much omg. The little kitten looking at the dog, and then watching it tear apart a teddy bear... omg. I just welled right up.)

[asakiyume]

AAAAAaaaaaaaAAAAaaahhh Kitbull! The animal behaviors were so perfectly shown, and the love OMG. Like you said, all the feels. Hard to watch at moments but overall so good. I recommended it on Twitter to friends who do rescue pitbull fostering.

[asakiyume]

(I will check out the other ones too but OMG Kitbull was so sweet, had to comment right away)

[sartorias]

"Happy Dance" was so sweet! Thanks for the links!

[sartorias]

And KitBull was lovely, though I almost bailed at the horrible treatment of the dog.

[osprey_archer]

Yes. I wanted it up near the top because I know sometimes people don't read all the way through, but also at the bottom because these are sort of in chronological order & it's the last one I watched.

[osprey_archer]

I went on a Kitbull recommending spree after I saw it. STOP RIGHT NOW AND WATCH THE CUTEST THING YOU'LL SEE ALL DAY, I told my friends. IT'S OKAY, I DIDN'T NEED MY HEART, they told me, after they'd watched it.

[osprey_archer]

Let me know what you think!

[osprey_archer]

I loved Happy Dance. It's just so...well, happy!

[silverusagi]

Yes, that was definitely the cutest thing I saw all week!

[osprey_archer]

Yessss. Spreading the cute!

[silverusagi]

Look what I just saw on Tumblr!

[asakiyume]

I really loved "Happy Dance"! I loved the main woman they talked to, and I loved the little girl who sings along, all the details the camera focused on--really nice.

"Locker Room" wasn't quite such a winner with me. I understood what it was doing, but it didn't feel emotionally truthful enough for me somehow? Or maybe truthful's the wrong word, maybe personal? But part of that reaction may just be that I can't really imagine myself in the girl's position... I think my reactions are suspect.

[osprey_archer]

Awwww. I'm so glad someone is drawing fanart!

[osprey_archer]

I loved the openness in Happy Dance - the dances are relatively simple and anyone can come join. It seemed very neighborly.

The girl's position in "Locker Room" is definitely a somewhat specific experience. Not every girl wants to be one of the guys (I never went for it), and, among girls who do want that, I think it's fairly common to just swallow something like the chat room - it's the price of admission, so to speak. But I was glad she decided to speak out against it instead.

[asakiyume]

This is going to sound emotionally dumb of me (maybe because it **is** emotionally dumb), but one thing I didn't understand was why she then said, when confronted by the boys, that she hadn't wanted anyone to get in trouble/thought no one would. I mean, as I type this, I guess I sort of understand how you can want that behavior to stop and can want authorities to know about it because you want it to stop, and simultaneously care about your friends and not want them to get in trouble, but surely every kid's experience is that "tattling"(scare quotes because I don't think of it as tattling) gets the person you're tattling on in trouble?** It struck me as painting the girl as naive in a hard-for-me-to-believe way to have her not foresee this consequence. But maybe she just compartmentalized her reporting from the consequences? ... Yeah, I guess I can sort of get that... and then she's miserable at the fallout, even though she did want the behavior to stop.

Okay. I guess I've worked through it, and I guess it's pretty emotionally realistic, after all. I was just being emotionally dumb ;-)

**Unless it has no consequence whatsoever--e.g., if you "tattle" on the money-generating college football team and nothing at all happens. In that situation, no message even gets back to the boys, or if it does, it's as a joke, and the only one who would suffer would be the girl herself. That was one way the film could have gone, and I'm glad it didn't do *that*.

[brigdh]

I enjoyed Locker Room – and I wonder if the name is meant to resonate with Trump's "locker room talk" comment? Though perhaps that's reading too much American politics into an Australia movie. But still, thanks for reccing it!

But mainly I want to say: KITBULL IS SO CUTE. AND SO EMOTIONAL. AND SO EXTREMELY PERFECT. One of my cats is a little black formerly-feral soot sprite herself, who has a lot of the same body language as the kitten in the film, and so: ALL THE FEELS INDEED.

[osprey_archer]

I don't know if it's meant to resonate with that specific comment, but I think it's definitely growing out of the more general #MeToo moment and a general growing recognition that boys-will-be-boys locker room talk isn't harmless, after all.

THE KITTEN'S BODY LANGUAGE OMG. THE WAY IT GOES FROM PLAYING WITH A BOTTLE CAP TO ALL THE WAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE YARD ALL PUFFED UP AND READY TO FIGHT. Ugggh so cute.

[osprey_archer]

My general feeling about that part was that it was dumb in an extremely teenage way, where someone will do a thing without thinking about consequences at all - or, in this case, think of one desired consequence to the exclusion of everything else: she tells and it works almost like a magic spell, all the bad stuff goes away and everything goes back to the good parts of the way it was before.

But of course when that plan hits reality, it doesn't work out so neatly.

[carmarthen]

a teenage girl in Australia discovers her male friends’ creepy group chat rating their female classmates; a thoughtful, sensitive picture of how thoughtless and insensitive adolescents can be

My male grad school classmates (in their 20s and 30s) had one of these. The two guys I was actually friends with apparently weren't invited (at least one of them would have found it disgusting; I think the other was morbidly curious but wouldn't have participated).

The thing is, my female classmates and I played "fuck marry kill" a couple times and talking about sex is absolutely a group bonding thing, so I'm like...is that different because it wasn't a Facebook group? Is it different because of the gender power dynamics? Or were we being just as gross? IDK.

Kitbull made me cry buckets, omg.

[osprey_archer]

I feel that the gender power dynamics and the Facebook group thing both work to make the guys' thing more gross, but then again I (and indeed anyone who has ever played fuck marry kill) have kind of a vested interest in that outcome, don't I? So I wouldn't like to be put in a position where I had to pronounce upon it officially.

Kitbull is SO FULL OF FEELINGS, my God.

[carmarthen]

Yeah, that's how I feel, but I am of course a biased party. But dumb games played while drunk seem different to me from a Facebook group memorializing the guys' sexiness (and maybe sexual, idk, I know there was some screwing around in our class but mostly quite discreet because most of it involved at least one party cheating, and I only know the particulars in one case) judgments of women in the group? IDK if I'd play FMK again, but the Facebook thing absolutely feels like a bridge too far to me.

Anyway, mostly wanted to observe that this kind of thing isn't limited to teens, unfortunately.