Bugs Bunny and the future of film
Critic says animated shorts show more imagination than most mainstream features
Peter Vesuwalla

A few columns ago I made a glib remark about not being able to think of a reason to care about the Oscars.

I was reminded of my statement when I saw Penguins Behind Bars and Other Animated Tales, a showcase of short animated National Film Board films which will play Feb. 15 at Cinematheque.

The NFB’s flagship film for the program, Torill Kove’s The Danish Poet, is one of the nominees in the best animated short category at this year’s rented-tux affair in L.A.

When the great NFB short Ryan topped the category in 2005, director Chris Landreth urged the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to continue to recognize lesser-known works in these categories.

At the time some took Landreth’s comment as a reference to the monumentally bad decision to have some recipients accept their Oscars from their places in the audience rather than take the stage, but Landreth told me two days later that he would have been happy to receive the award out in the parking lot. Still, it’s a shame more people don’t get the chance to see the films in the short, animated and documentary categories.

Time and again these films prove most worthy of recognition, and most of the shorts in the NFB program serve as a reminder of the possibilities of cinema at a time when most of the stuff in the multiplex shows such a limited view of what a film can be.

Kove’s delicately animated short, for example, is told as a nice little children’s tale but amounts to nothing less than a piece on the wonder and enchantment of life itself and the mind-boggling complexity of chance and fate.

While it’s a highlight in the series, it’s not even the best film. That honour, I think, is shared by Regina Pessoa’s Tragic Story With Happy Ending and Shira Avni’s John and Michael. Both are beautifully rendered in rich monochrome, and you can almost feel the texture of the ink. While the former is more an allegorical tale about a little girl who just doesn’t belong, the latter has a stunning psychological complexity almost unheard of in mainstream films. Both are masterpieces.

The collection is marred, unfortunately, by the inclusion of the titular film, Janet Perlman’s Penguins Behind Bars, a collection of bad penguin puns that seems to go on forever and which depends entirely on the fact that the characters are anthropomorphic penguins for its humour.

The collection is redeemed by a couple of other animal-related inclusions, however, including At Home With Mrs. Hen by Tali, which has a sly sense of humour reminiscent of Les Triplettes de Belleville, and A Cow’s Tale by John Tanasciuk. Both films embrace the psychology of their protagonists’ respective species and are better off for it.

If only every Oscar hopeful in every category could show the flare and imagination of the films in this collection.

Peter Vesuwalla talks movies with Terry MacLeod every Friday at 7:45 a.m. on CBC Radio One 990.