If I Was God...

This Canadian film by Cordell Barker was actually better than some of the Oscar-nominated films shown during this year's showing in theaters. It was made using various types of animation and I couldn't tell if it was mostly done through stop-motion or computer generated graphics that were made to look like stop-motion. Regardless, it's very, very well made and looked impressive.

The story is just a slice of life about a man reminiscing about his life as a boy. In this instance, he's thinking back to the day when he was to dissect a frog and the way he used fantasy to deal with this. It's very clever and enjoyable. It's also the best film featuring frog guts that I think I've ever seen. In fact, I'd love to see this story hashed out into some sort of feature length cartoon.

Cordell Baker's stop-motion musings on adolescence, awful teachers, and electrically animating cut-up frogs was not nominated for the Academy Award this year, and I can only conclude that the people who choose the nominees think that.... Well, I don't know what they think. Perhaps they don't.

This one is not a story so much as it is an essay on those long days in the classroom when you'd much rather be doing almost anything else. It's handled with humor and is clearly the work of someone who remembers being twelve or thirteen and noticing for the first time how pretty that girl who's been in your class for six years, yet never talked to, is.

Many of the nationally sponsored animations these days are all about Art. Neither Baker nor the National Film Board of Canada have forgotten to be interesting and amusing.