The Worldwide Short Film Festival is currently running in Toronto. I attended a program today that included Chris Landreth's new film, The Spine , as well as the latest Wallace and Gromit half hour, A Matter of Loaf and Death , directed by Nick Park. Both films are consistent with their creators' previous work. The Spine Landreth's approach to animation is a sort of German Expressionism. While the German films of the 1920s expressed their characters' emotions through their surroundings, Landreth uses the characters' own bodies as expressions of their mental and emotional states. This film has to do with a marriage, where the partners are deformed in ways that relate to their experiences and needs. The problem with this approach is that it requires that the characters be tormented in some way, and that makes each Landreth film an appointment with dysfunction. In addition, Landreth is more enamored of technique than he is of character. The husband and wife eac...
