Ottawa International Animation Festival Review Roundup

This past weekend Josh attended Ottawa International Animation Festival and took in some of the best the animation world has to offer. Here are three shorts that stuck out as some of the best of the bunch!

States of Matter, dir. Marvin Hauck

An experimental journey unfolds in Marvin Hauck’s enigmatic short film States of Matter, a strata-cut animation, born from the alchemy of wax and paper. The film echoes the mysterious cycle of metamorphosis: molten wax, once fluid and formless, is shaped into solid sculptures, only to be methodically sliced and resurrected through animation. Close-up, magnified frames reveal a hidden world of textures and movements, with each delicate ripple and subtle fold brought to life by a damply tactile soundscape that invites the viewer to lean in and listen as much as to watch.

Hauck’s artistic roots trace back to his creative media studies in Hong Kong and deepen through his master’s in animation in the Netherlands, where he became fascinated by the secret language of strata-cut animation. This rare technique, a form of stop-motion, traditionally uses clay “loaves” embedded with intricate imagery. Each thin slice of these loaves reveals a moment frozen in time, a frame in an unfolding story hidden within solid matter. Wax, less forgiving but infinitely more mysterious, adds a fragile poetry to the process, its malleability a challenge and a chance to embrace imperfection and texture.

The crafting of these internal worlds is an act of delicate complexity. Abstract patterns emerge like natural mosaics, born from the building and layering colour and form, while fleeting figurative shapes pulse with hidden life. States of Matter is fully abstract, only globs and smears of white on black, yet its shapes and patterns manage to evoke everything from rainfall and crashing waves to ice crystals forming to swirling galaxies in a starry sky. Hauck becomes both sculptor and storyteller, anticipating the dance of light and shadow that will breathe motion into stone-like silence. The result is a hypnotic, underground realm where imagery flows and morphs in a mesmerizing rhythm.

Inspired by the visionary wax experiments of Oskar Fischinger in the 1920s, States of Matter emerges from the depths of Hauck’s postgraduate exploration, crafting a meditation on transformation, materiality, and time. This lineage of experimentation harks back to Fischinger’s “Wax Slicing Machine,” an ingenious device syncing a vertical slicer with a camera shutter, capturing the soul of a sculpture in progressive cross-sections. Fischinger’s collaboration with Walter Ruttmann and contributions to Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed planted seeds for modern animation, blending abstraction with narrative magic.

Hauck’s work is a contemporary echo of Fischinger’s spirit. States of Matter is an homage and an evolution—where wax and paper transcend their physicality to become ephemeral sculptures of light and shadow. When washes of brilliant colour begin to be revealed towards the end of the film that has otherwise been mostly shimmeringly monochromatic, it becomes a nearly transcendent experience. Through the slow unveiling of each slice of wax, States of Matter becomes a poetic dance, a tactile meditation on the beauty found within transformation, the passage from liquid to solid, silence to sound, stillness to motion.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

The Night Boots, dir. Pierre-Luc Granjon

Like a series of charcoal drawings torn out of a lost-and-found spooky children’s book, Pierre-Luc Granjon’s The Night Boots takes viewers on an adventurous journey through dark woods. The realistically detailed backgrounds mix with incredibly exaggerated stylized characters to create a play of light and shadow that not only frightens but also shows the power of bravery and friendship.

 At a late-night dinner party, young Eliot’s parents and their friends spend the evening talking about werewolves and full moons before sending the boy to bed, planting in his head the seeds of a scary nightmare—or a grand adventure. Eliot puts on his boots, screws his courage to the sticking place, and sneaks out into the moonlight. He climbs a tree and The Little Creature he finds there asks him what he can see, “Can’t you see it? The Monster?” Eliot is super brave, not afraid to take on whatever challenges lie ahead of him, but The Night Boots is not the terrifying quest it seems like at first glance, but instead is something like a chiaroscuro Where the Wild Things Are, a world where monsters are friends, and the full moon lights the path wherever you wander.

 To create The Night Boots Granjon used a method called pinscreen animation. It uses a metallic frame in which 277,000 white tubes are stuck and within each tube, there is a 5mm long black pin. When all the pins are pushed inside, only the tubes are visible, and the screen is white. With the pins pulled out, they project a shadow on the surface from the side-lit projector and these shadows create different greys and black. The immense amount of work required to create a single frame, as well as the practical restrictions of pinscreen animation have led to its reputation as one of the last popular methods of animating. Granjon, though, uses the pinscreen to its full effect. He felt that pinscreen was the right tool for The Night Boots because it is set on a night of full moon in the countryside and the pinscreen gives a feeling of sculpting in light and the shadow. When all the pins are out, the screen looks like a black velvet, using glass tools to move the pins makes the light appears almost like magic.

Granjon used the technical limitations of the pinscreen to heighten the eerie crepuscular feeling of The Night Boots. Characters don’t move fluidly, they simply evaporate and reappear, being closer and closer to each other. Even when they run, the feeling is of a magical arrival at your destination, here then there, with no in between, like in a dream. The oneiric feeling carries through in the way one shot dissolves into the next; some details, especially in the characters are clearly defined, while some of the dreamiest settings have an ominous blankness, a part of the map that Eliot has yet to discover. The square shape of the pinscreen, too, keeps Eliot’s night journey contained, nothing is redundant The Night Boots.

Above all, The Night Boots is a film about friendship and finding bravery within yourself (not to mention a fantastic entry into the Ghibliesque canon of weird little guys in the woods, creatures who pull themselves out of the earth and climb a tree then float into space and become stars). Eliot’s nocturnal outing takes him through secret tunnels and meetings with friendly monsters and Cloud Gobblers. But in the end, he has to leave his adventures behind for school tomorrow.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

The Girl Who Cried Pearls, dirs. Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski

The night everything changed I witnessed something extraordinary, magical…

In The Girl Who Cried Pearls, Oscar-nominated filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski (Madame Tutli-Putli, 2007) craft a tale of the endless greed of men and the mysterious working of the divine. The Girl Who Cried Pearls reminds us that it’s the story behind something that gives it a value, not the object itself. In a present-day castle full of elegant crystal glassware, beautifully ornate furniture, and glittering jewelry, a young girl and her Grandfather (voiced by Canadian treasure Colm Feore) wonder, of all of the treasures in the room, which is the most precious?

Grandfather has an answer, and it’s a story he has kept secret; a very old story going way, way back. The bulk of The Girl Who Cried Pearls is this story told in flashback, to when Grandfather was a boy living in Montreal. In contrast to riches of his present life, the young version of Grandfather is homeless and stealing to get by. The young boy becomes enamoured of his beautiful neighbor, a girl overwhelmed by grief who cries all night, only she cries pearls instead of tears. The boy saves her pearl tears, and tries to sell them to a pawnshop.

Lavis and Szczerbowski eschew traditional pre-production methods like storyboarding, instead having actors run scenes over and over, capturing close-ups, mid-shots, long shots. They film these rehearsals with multiple handheld cameras, preserving spontaneous gestures and emotional rhythms. Using a camera and puppet, it becomes more convincing than something abstracted from a storyboard. The immaculately crafted sets of The Girl Who Cried Pearls are so detailed, that is possible even to read the tiny newspapers that line the walls of the neighbours’ rooms.

The film uses two distinct puppet styles. The rough-hewn puppets of the past Montreal story look like religious icons, like the old wooden saints in a rural church, coarsely carved out of old wood, with faces feel really worn from time and the elements. The present-day puppets were created in silicone and painted as realistically as possible, lending them an uncanny expressiveness. The puppets use aluminum wire, which can be crushed and squeezed in ways ball-and-socket armatures can’t. Claymation shapes the puppets further, allowing for even more fluidity. The incredibly detailed way the puppets are dress, by costume designer YSO, from laundry hung on a clothesline, to the tiny fraying holes in the poorer characters’ sweaters.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls was inspired in part by the story of an art forger who slipped, used the wrong titanium white, which was discovered under X-ray. The forger got revealed and discredited, and all of his paintings overnight went from magnificent compositions with brilliant use of color to garbage. For Lavis and Szczerbowski, the job they do as writers and filmmakers is create mythologies. These new narratives give all the value to the thing. It’s ironic, and deliberate, that a film so deeply invested in the value of narrative is also so beautifully detailed and full of visual treasures. The puppets, sets, and costumes draw us into the film, but it’s the myth they carry that lasts past the end of The Girl Who Cried Pearls. 

Review by: Joshua Hunt