The short movies showing in this three-day, kid-friendly program can’t and don’t compete with the big-budget snazziness of Finding Nemo or Spirited Away. For these films, spanning thirty years of Iranian animation, the creative spark comes from the minds of the animators, not the wallets of the producers. The series is subtitled, but even pre-readers will probably enjoy the stories, which are more often than not nearly dialogue-free anyhow. And if a lesson about sharing, standing up to bullies, and being nice to each other isn’t universal, what is? U Film also screens The Traveler, the 1974 debut of Iran’s most highly acclaimed director, Abbas Kiarostami. It’s the tale of a soccer-crazy boy who turns to crime so he can buy tickets to a big game in Teheran, and should also appeal to children even if they don’t pick up on the thematic echoes to Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. You know how five-year-olds just go crazy for the 1940s Italian neorealism.
U Film, 10 Church St. S.E.,
(612) 3313-3134, www.ufilm.org
Walker, 725 Vineland Place,
(612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org
MOVIES
British Television
Advertising Awards
Walker Art Center, December 5-28
Thanks to the ubiquitous idiot box, we all see more thirty-second films in a week than feature-length ones in a year. It’s too bad, really. Very short movies are a perfectly valid artistic form, but our viewing habits make us resent them because they’re always buzzing around trying to sell us something. Still, the best really do approach the level of art. That’s one reason this compilation of the Queen’s best adverts is such a perennial Walker audience favorite. Another is, we’re all still trying to figure out what “marmite” is and why anyone would want a jar of it. The cleverness and wit that the award winners display here is formidable, and is still more entertaining than an evening at home watching American commercials, though that line’s been blurring every year. It’s a little disappointing to see how many of the British spots are for all-too-familiar products like McDonald’s and Nike, Cockney accent or not. Of course, England still has a distinct advantage in the production of emotionally wrenching public-service announcements of the sort unimaginable on U.S. screens.
Walker, (612) 375-7622, www.walkerart.org
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