Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Here’s a fun fact: women are more likely to be nominated – and win – an American Academy Award as Best Director of an animated feature than helming a live action film. Marjane Sartrapi, Jennifer Yuh Nelson and, most recently Nora Twomey have been nominated. Brenda Chapman and Jennifer Lee won in successive years for Brave and Frozen respectively. Significantly, Sartrapi, Nelson and Chapman have subsequently made – or are making – the transition to live action films. The route to directing animation can be straight forward. You start as ‘head of story’ as Brenda Chapman did and then convince a producer that you can shepherd a film to completion. Nora Twomey’s route was different. She co-directed (with Tomm Moore) The Secret of Kells and then spent four years to bring her animated film version of Deborah Ellis’ novel, The Breadwinner , to the screen. The film, from Kilkenny’s Cartoon Saloon, is quite literally a labour of love. It is about the love that an eleven year-old girl,...

  There are only two actors in the Swedish drama, Granny’s Dancing On The Table , but more than two characters. Everyone bar a father and daughter living alone deep in the woods is represented by animated figures. Swedish writer-director Hanna Sköld owes something of a debt to Czech animation maestro Jan Svankmajer, though animated figures and living ones don’t interact as they might in his work. Rather, the animated figures, including the Granny of the title, illustrate the past or, in one memorable scene, a brutally violent version of the present. It is easy to cut off the hand of a model than fake the bloodshed. Eini (Blanka Engström) is our blonde-haired teenage narrator, a virtual prisoner of her father (Lennart Jähkel). When we first see her, she looks beaten up. When they move into a cottage, her father gets her to count the drinking glasses. One is missing. When he discovers the broken glass, he attempts to shame her. There is no hint of sexual abuse, but it is clear that...

Pictured : Kiah ( Keira Jang ) in 'recorder mode' in a scene from the Canadian 'alternate future' film, ' Can I Get A Witness? ' written and directed by Ann Marie Fleming . Still courtesy of Mongrel Media . I have more of a problem with the title, Can I Get A Witness? than the film itself. I spent much of my son’s childhood and adolescence reminding him that ‘can’ is about ability and ‘may’ is about permission. In Canadian writer-director Ann Marie Fleming’s alternate future-set film, citizens who reach the age of fifty automatically receive a witness to their state authorised death, though nobody in the movie talks about the government, which frankly must come as a relief. If someone delivers a refrigerator to your home, it is because you have chosen the option to consume a chilled alcoholic beverage before having lethal chemicals – a form of anti-pollen – released in your presence. Fleming describes her film as a ‘fable’. According to one AI definition, a fab...