Flatlife

How often will it happen that a young guy sends his very first, not even finished, movie to one of the most famous film festivals in the world and then sees how it is not only selected as one of the movies that will be shown during the festival, but even gets nominated for the Golden Palm and gets the Jury Prize? Normally you would say never, but it happened to Jonas Geirnaert, a young student animation who sent in his unfinished graduation-work and astonished the world with it.

"Flatlife" shows life in a block of apartments. Even though the four inhabitants don't seem to have anything to do with each other, their actions influence the lives of the others. When for instance one of them switches his television to another channel, the other one's television switches channels too. When the washing machine of one of the inhabitants malfunctions, everything in the other apartments starts shaking around...

I don't know if Geirnaert wanted to give us some kind of message with this short film. I guess there are many different ways of interpreting it all, but in my opinion that's not even the most important part of the movie. Thanks to the sometimes absurd humor (like for instance a flying panda), this is just incredibly funny. And although I feared that I wouldn't like it all that much, because I was expecting a lot, maybe even too much of it (over here it was an incredible hype), I must admit that there was absolutely no reason for that fear. This was just a very good short animation film which made me laugh out loud a couple of times. I give it an 8/10 and I hope that Geirnaert will come up with more movies like this in the future.

This short by young fellow Belgian Jonas Geirnaert is already notable for the fact that the guy went to Cannes with his yet to be finished film, actually his graduation film (not yet judged by his teachers), won an important prize and had a remarkable speech afterwards saying "Don't vote Bush, in case Michael Moore shouldn't have the chance to say that this evening". This got him the recognition of a large part of the public, not in the least Moore himself. So, maybe we got a major filmmaker of the future on our hands here, ...with or without the help of MM. Now, is the short worth the fuzz? Pretty much so, yeah. It's a pretty darn funny and imaginative short, all the more remarkable by being the product of such a young filmmaker. I'm not sure what it's it trying to say, I guess you can interpret it in different ways, but I surely liked it and laughed several times. Catch it if you can. 8/10

What can I say, other than "watch it and laugh" ? This animation short about life in adjacent apartment flats was made by a student, which means that it still shows some signs of inexperience. However, it is quite as funny as works made by far older and far more experienced artists.

Since the appearance of "Flatlife" a lot of water has flowed through the Scheldt. Jonas Geirnaert, the maker of this promising animation short, has gone on to fame (and, hopefully, fortune) as an all-round artist : comedian, presenter, writer of screenplays, voice artist, and so on. To stick to the animation work : among other things, he is the creator of "Kabouter Wesley", a foul-mouthed gnome evolving in a fairytale world which contains - to quote but one example - larcenous dolphins with speech impediments. (I can't say that I'm too fond of the "Kabouter Wesley" cartoons or animation shorts, but there's no denying their cleverness and invention.)

"Flatlife" already shows one of the hallmarks of Geirnaert's style : an apparent simplicity that hides a great deal of intelligence and sophistication. Moreover, Geirnaert possesses an admirable sense of comic timing.