Sprockets Film Fest

So yesterday, almost all of the CyberARTS students went to the Sprockets Film fest. It's a film festival that featured several short films, some by film school graduates others by film students in their 3rd or 4th year of school as well as a feature length french film called "U"

Now, knowing my bad memory, I had a feeling I would forget some of the films featured at the film festival, however the ones I do remember were the animated films "Animal" and "The Art of Drowning","On the Bus","Forget Myself","The Freshwater Plague" and "Toxic Ingedients". Now some of these films I didn't like such as Toxic Ingerdients. It was essentually a comentary on the toxic ingredients in makeup that could cause many health issues down the line. It's not that I didn't understand it..I just didn't like it much. Two films that I liked for different reasons were The Art of Drowing and Animal amoung others. I liked Animal because even though there is no speech, I liked it because there was a small organism that was eaten at least twice and everytime the preditor dies. At the end of the film, a frog eats the organism but dies almost immediatly after eating it. Soon after, a flower grows out of the frog and re-creates the same organism. This could probably be a represention of the food cycle. With the flower growing out of the frog could mean there is life where there is death. Another film I liked was The Art of Drowning. I liked this film not just because of its depressing nature and overtones(assuming that makes sense) but I did like the idea behind it and the art style. The plot of the film in a nutshell is a man narriating his final thoughts as he is drowning as well as the nature of the whole "life flashing before his eyes" thing that happens just before you die. It was dark but it was a good film.

There was also a french movie call "U". It was about a unicorn named U that appears to a rabbit princess named Mona(I could be wrong about her name) when she was young. Years later Mona falls in love with a guitar-playing cat from the traveling family, the Yeah Yeahs(I forget his name :P) while U falls in love with Lizare who is in the same family as the cat. By the end of the film, The Cat and Mona plan to get married while U and Lizare tell eachother that they love each other. Now I'll admit that I'm bias toward this film because it's in french and that is something I can't overlook, however, the film did have exellent character development and the film did have more than one character focal point as it turned it's attention to other characters besides Mona. Now, watching this film, there are differences between North American style cartoons and Cartoons from other countries like U. In France, it is very likely that there standerds for what appropriate for young children are different than North America. Even though it is definately out of the norm compared to other childrens shows in North America, I can't imagin a network like Treehouse or YTV editing or censoring it because of a descriptive kiss compared anime that shows lots of blood.