Manchester Animation Festival Pt.1

On the first day of the manchester animation festival, I went to go see some pretty interesting things. I went to see the shorts, many of which were weird, some were very interesting as well.

This one was pretty strange. Basically it was humans acting like birds. and all of them were naked.

 I enjoyed this one a lot. I was a piece about a group of birds wanting freedom from an underground civilization. it was very conceptual as well.

 

 This was a strange one. It was a stop motion piece about the concepts of heaven and following a "supreme being". Or at least thats what i got out of it.

 

As the compilation went on it seemed to get stranger and stranger. I could get very little meaning out of this one. It was a loose animation with very random imagery against a technobass backing.

 While this picture started out cute, it ended as a metaphor for going into war and the expectations versus the reality of both historical and modern warfare.

 This one was very vague in its story telling. It was roughly about an ice breaker and her living with some kind of schizophrenia, I think. It was very graphic.

 I really enjoyed the ideas behind this one. It was about a father losing an opportunity to communicate with his daughter, and emphasizes on the stresses modern workers face when it comes to balancing family and work life.

 At first this one was both strange as it was creepy. It was about a woman and her small baby messing up her life. The twist at the end was that the 'baby' was actually her cat.

 This was a 3D piece about a robot working as a dishwasher, and breaking out of his servitude and traveling the world. pretty straightforward.

 This was a piece about a man holding a secret for his entire life about killing one of his friends.

This piece was about a Chinese woman asking her grandmother what it was like growing up under Mao in China. This was probably one of my favorite ones, just due to it having a clear message in its making.

After this we went to go see Phantom Boy, a 2D french film about a child with cancer having the ability to go out of his body when he sleeps. Afterwards, we saw My Life as a Courgette, a french stop motion film about a child going to an orphanage. I also attended the Aardman Retrospective, where I learned much about the history of Aardman Studios.