“It’s you who decides,” counsels a friend, which also goes for audiences and what they make of the kaleidoscopic ride. The short’s Latin title refers to the protective spirit of a given location, but here, the concept takes on a slightly menacing tone, as Reine is overwhelmed by her surroundings, even herself becoming a feral animal at one point. “All around me I find chaos,” Reine says, which Mérigeau interprets through a succession of striking, retro-modernist watercolors: Faces break down into cubist elements scattered pages resemble a pack of running dogs a homeless man transforms into a blue horse.
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Staged like an ant farm, the movie’s full of cross-sectional sight gags, which reward multiple viewings - although without dialogue, it’s sometimes tough to understand what the conflict is (the character must learn to ask for help from her neighbors).Įven more confusing, but compensating for it with stunning visuals (and visual ideas), French animator Adrien Mérigeau’s “ Genius Loci” offers a subjective, surrealistic portrait through the eyes (or imagination) of Reine, a young Black woman trying to process the sounds and swirls of urban Paris - a symphony of abstract distractions. These critters can’t speak but are human-like in virtually every other sense, save one: They all live underground, which complicates things for our bunny hero(ine), who’s trying to dig a one-room dwelling (complete with disco), but keeps bumping into others’ burrows. Madeline Sharafian’s adorable but basic bunny toon “ Burrow” was developed within Disney/Pixar’s SparkShorts program, a creative sandbox for up-and-coming voices, which also produced previous nominee “Kitbull.” Choosing hand-drawn techniques over the studio’s traditional hyper-polished 3D rendering, the film boasts an old-fashioned, storybook feel, starring a menagerie of cute googly-eyed animals - a regular “Wind in the Willows” of badgers, mice, salamanders and moles. Compared with past editions, this is a relatively weak year, though it’s always a treat to survey the range of offerings, released in theaters and on demand by ShortsTV. A few of the talents have ties to Pixar, though only one short was actually developed at a studio, while the other four are far more personal, independent expressions with little in common, least of all technique. Those who typically scope the Academy Award-nominated shorts programs hoping to win the Oscar pool will have a particularly tough time of it with this year’s animated roster, as the options are wide-ranging but lack a clear front-runner.