Category: Encounters

A short animation about a submariner who meets an astronaut. A sweet tale of friendship about being different in the same way.

Great little animated short. Colour! is dialogue-free, but uses colour and music to illustrate the daunting experience of being the odd-one-out from a child’s perspective. It tells a story about race, but strips it back, without dialogue to articulate the historically- and socially-laden topic, to just the way it makes you feel.

The main character is a little pink girl who has moved to a blue town and is starting at a blue school. She starts off happy and cheerful, undaunted by the prospect of meeting new people and making new friends. She understands she is different but doesn’t see that as an issue.

Little by little, her difference is highlighted, stumbled over, rejected and corrected by others. Her difference is framed as a problem by those around her. By the teacher who struggles and fails to pronounce her name correctly. By the kids who are disgusted by the smell of her packed lunch. By the art teacher who criticises her way of painting. Everything she does is expressive of a different viewpoint in life, but given the consensus among everyone from the uniform group, a difference, an outlier, is seen as wrong.

Your heart sinks as you see her try to dull or change her colour. It makes you realise that so often we portray the effects of racism as violent and explosive, when a lot of the time, it can just feel like death by a thousand cuts.

But the story doesn’t end on a sad note, and emphasises the importance of representation, as the wee girl sees her colour reflected back at her in a piece of media, takes courage, and dares to live bravely as herself. And her classmates take a keener interest, valuing her difference as something that enriches their lives too.

Lovely wee film.

Wonderful animated short. The Girl Behind The Mirror tells the story of a young trans girl who is struggling with her fears about living as her authentic self. It starts with her hiding in her room, frightened of the reactions of the adults around her.

A girl appears in the mirror, calling out and comforting her. She takes her through the mirror into her own bedroom, painted the colours she likes, full of cuddly toys. The girl in the mirror is confident and happy, she wears her hair long and has pretty dresses. She lets the young trans lassie stay in her room, safe and comforted, and she steps through the mirror to take her place.

The girl in the mirror is a reflection of who the young lassie wants to become, and the short film shows her keeping that scared younger version of herself safe, while she takes the steps to show her family and the world who she really is.

Really touching short film.

Whimsical animated short about a water tower called Theo who will not stop crying. He has a wee pal who tries to cheer him up and take him on adventures with his dog, but wherever they go they are met with hostility as Theo’s tears flood those around him. A fun and silly little romp for kids.

Beautiful little animated short. We see through the eyes of a child exploring the world around them, innocent of the day’s perils, labours and life-changing events. Lovely painted style of animation and evocative sound design.

A wee person prays in a temple when a spirit appears and shows the interconnected nature of life. Beautifully animated with a gentle score.

Cute little kids’ cartoon about a scrap paper man cutting himself out a birthday party. Sweet.

I really liked this short animation, thought it was funny and sweet. But in the Q&A afterwards, there was a variety of interpretation of it that was surprising.

Largely dialogue-free, Flamingo Pride focuses on one grumpy and withdrawn curmudgeon in a flock of queer flamingos, who sulks all through the Pride party. He clocks a beautiful female swan flying past and follows her to the resolutely heteronormative pond nearby. There, his overtures of romance meet with mockery from the surrounding fowl, and as his attempts become more desperate, hilarity ensues. The final shot is of the demure swan emerging from the reeds in dominatrix gear with a kinky look in her eye.

I thought it was funny. My reading was that the main character was bi, and feeling alienated at the solely gay-focused Pride party, but then seen as way too queer when in straight spaces like the pond. I thought it was about crossing social boundaries, built up by conscious and unconscious biases, one which the swan’s kinkiness shows are artificial – normativity doesn’t represent the diversity in straight sexuality either.

But perhaps that reading has a lot to do with my own experience. In the Q&A, the room read the main character as straight, and the depiction of the queer Pride party as somehow comparably exclusionary as the hetero pond was seen as controversial. When checking out the creator online, it seems a lot of people found the animation to be actively homophobic, showing an oppressed straight main character isolated in a gay world. I was really surprised by this, because the queer flamingos are joyous and always trying to include him in their revelries. Unlike the birds at hetero pond, the flamingos don’t mock him for pursuing the swan, or hinder him in any way. It’s totally ok for him to do his own thing, and the worst they can be accused of is not realising the type of loud party Pride they are enjoying is maybe not for everyone.

The other criticism is that it deals too much in stereotypical clichés, like the pink flamingos as gay, the fact that Pride is shown as such a monolithic party experience, the flamingos act in a stereotypical way. In the absence of dialogue, the animation is reliant on visual cues, and clearly there is a good argument to be made that in this case those have been exaggerated to a potentially offensive level.

I dunno, maybe it depends on the context in which you are watching it. I saw it as part of a series of shorts celebrating queer experience, so I took it in a positive light. And being bi, that’s what I saw in the story, a grumpy bisexual.

I can only speak for myself, I thought it was funny.

A great wee short film about the power of drag. Not many stories focus on drag kings, so it’s nice to see this for a change.

Sarah is running in the Queen of Sheppey pagaent, like her older sister and mother before her. Everything is pink dresses and big teeth. I love the sense of place this has. Never heard of Sheppey before, wasn’t even sure it was a real place, but the film instantly captures that dreich seaside town feel. It’s not quite a shithole, there’s too much love of the place in there, like it’s totally beautiful on the days you’re not fighting a seagull off your chips, but it’s not exactly the happening place to be.

Sarah’s mum and sister are stick-thin and hyperfemme, and have clearly never given any thought to the possibility of Sarah not following in their footsteps. Her mum keeps a space over the mantle for Sarah’s inevitable crowning photo. But it’s like they don’t see her. Uncomfortable in dresses, which are built for their frame and not hers, she seems awkward and out of place up on the stage. The first time we see her really relax is when she’s alone in the house and slaps on some Queen, and gets dragged up as Freddy Mercury to do the hoovering.

Hot new girl-next-door Scout spots her through the window, and soon their shared secret kicks off a fond friendship, and maybe more. Scout gives Sarah a space of acceptance, encouragement, and validation.

What I liked about this film was it didn’t say, you have to pick and choose. This is not part of the narrative of them and us, the straights and the gays, the femmes and the butches. Despite the social structure which creates division between people by ascribing preference and privilege to one over the other, people still manage every day to relate to each other with respect for their differences. And yeah, the heteronormativity of the pageant and her family feels stifling, but the film doesn’t then cast them as malevolent. An embrace of one doesn’t have to mean a rejection of the other.

Awesome to see drag kings getting some love, and for their need for drag as something transformative to also be acknowledged.

Lotus Lantern is a dreamy, musical short animation about the filmmaker’s identity as queer and Chinese. Suffused with song, objects and symbols, the short film follows pieces of their identity like a string of pearls. Entrancing.