Dallas Film Festival - Animated Shorts

Today, I went to the Dallas Video Festival showings at the Dallas Museum of Art. I saw the Animated Shorts block in the C3 Tech Lab. It was interesting that it was at the DMA because there were some people there solely for the art exhibits and others there for the video festival. All were admirers of art, but were there to enjoy different mediums. Some people were wandering around from theater to theater and others were just watching select films - like me. 

The shorts I watched were "Waiting for Her Sailor," "The Flying House," "Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest," "and/or," "Princesse," "White Out," "Flawed," "Summer Bummer," "Guard Dog Global Jam," and "One Minute Puberty." My feelings about these films varied greatly. Most of them were cute; a couple I was unimpressed by; "and/or" made absolutely no sense to me. There are four films I want to focus on - two that I liked and two that I hated. 

The first one that I liked was "Ingrid Pitt." It was a tale of a girl who managed to escape from a concentration camp with her mother during World War II. It looked like it was animated by an eleven-year-old - because it was. She animated the tale as Ingrid Pitt told it. It was quite an amazing story. Another that I enjoyed was "Flawed." It was a heart-warming little story about how a woman meets a man that she likes, but she is uncomfortable with his profession. She discovers through the course of the story that it is not the profession itself (plastic surgeon), but how it made her feel when she was younger. She was uncomfortable with the size of her nose when she was a kid, and blamed the practice of plastic surgery for creating an unattainable ideal. Through the course of the story, she learns something about herself, he gains a new perspective, and they both grow closer together. 

That being said, there were two films that I was not pleased with. First of all, "One Minute Puberty" was unnecessarily crude. But it was nowhere near as awful as "Princesse." A couple of minutes into this film, I figured out what it was trying to say. I wish that it had stopped there. If it had, I would have been writing about how much I loved it and how touching it was. But no, it had to go into all sorts of awful details. It was incredibly graphic and it disturbed me deeply. I wish that I had been watching it in a normal theater, because then I could have walked out. But the set-up of the room would not allow me to do that without being rude, so I was forced to stay and watch as it got more and more graphic and unsettling. I wish so much that I had never seen that, because I am a thinker, and things like that sneak their way into my thoughts as my mind wanders, and sometimes they make their way into my nightmares. I understand the point that it was trying to make, but it was disturbing without warning.