The short film gods have smiled kindly upon me and I will be previewing a number of the programs for the upcoming Worldwide Short Film Festival. Tonight we start our tour with Shorts For Shorties: Into (And Out of) This World! a program that it tailored for the young and young at heart.
Oh man are you guys and gals in for a treat. To start, this year they programmed three, yes, count them, THREE! Shaun the Sheep shorts from the Aardman Animation series. Stick With Me, Hiccups and The Snore Worn Shaun are laugh out loud funny. Other very funny entries include Because You're Gorgeous, a story about a warthog with vanity issues, and Twit-Twit, a very sharp CG short about robots on pump trolleys, passenger powered rail cars, meeting at a toll booth in the middle of a desert.
No program for children would be complete if it missed the opportunity to inform and educate them as well. World in Your Hands and Emission Admission touch on taking care of the world we live in. Emission Admission is especially catchy with its hip-hop score. Aboriginality is an absolutely stunning mix of animation and live action, a story about a boy who discovers some traditional First Nations dance while watching television. It is in fact too short, I wish it was longer.
And the man with his finger on the pulse of Canadian and International culture, George Stroumboulopoulos- if ever I had a favorite Canadian on-air celebrity this is the guy- lends his voice to narrate the film Back In '93, a story of a young boy living in Toronto who comes out of the Hockey Closet and shows his devotion to the Montreal Canadiens after they won the Stanley Cup in 1993. It features a young boy who wears a fake mustache. How can it miss?
There are 18 shorts in Shorts for Shorties and all help make it a very eclectic and entertaining program.