City Paradise

This film was included in THE ANIMATION SHOW VOLUME THREE--a compilation of short films arranged by Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge. Overall, this is a very impressive DVD--and much of it is due to CITY PARADISE.

The plot of CITY PARADISE is pretty much indescribable, as it's very surreal and will make your head explode if you think too much. The animation style is pretty exciting--with a combination of live action and animation. In many scenes, the faces are digitized human faces applied to spider-like drawings--though many of the minor characters are simply animated. The backgrounds, like the people, are also a combination of digital images and animation.

The story, from what I am able to describe, is about a Japanese woman who comes to London. However, once there it just gets weirder and weirder but you also find yourself transfixed because of the unusual story and animation. More an artistic work than a cartoon.

A young Oriental girl sits at home learning useful English phrases about how bad the weather is. When the time comes, she sets out to go to her diving lessons at her local pool. Rushing into the public area she falls and knocks her head before falling in. In the water she finds herself in a place that could not be in a public swimming pool and investigates.

This film was one of the annual (I think) series of films that are shown under the Animator In Residence (AIR) programme where new animators are funded and presented with a television audience (in this case in the minutes immediately after the channel 4 news at 7pm). Other years have presented some very inventive and very attractive short films – at least one of which has won a BAFTA (The Dog Who Was A Cat Inside). This short delivers a plot that I struggled to put into words because it is just plain weird but, at only three minutes long, this is less important than the overall quality of the film itself. The animation uses a mix of styles and it comes off generally pretty well. Aesthetically I preferred the underwater bits to the stuff that seemed to be a mix of reality and animation – the latter style always looks creepy to me and put me off a little bit. The short ends with a bewildering conclusion to events but does close with a cute little song and some cool end credits – although they were difficult to read and made the job of adding this film to the database to be a lot harder!

Overall, a strange film that is more about the animation than anything else but it is still nice to be able to turn on television and see new work like this being put out there for people to find – if only the BBC did more of this rather than mostly leaving it to the commercial station of channel 4 to carry the bag for new talent.

This is an art film! It is weird, but take it for its beauty and its amazing animation, rather than a film to make a point. Foriegness is beautiful!

Enjoy this film for its richness of animation, its color choice, its music. Every aspect of this film blows me away. It is like you are in a different place. And that is the beauty of this film. You get to feel as foreign as the young lady in the film. There is wonder in all that is new and there is a beauty in what is foreign.

Also there is a bit of humor in this film. its humor is in the mockery of British life, the rain. The words she learns are part of this mockery.

watch this film.