In honor of the 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival and the Golden Badger Awards given out to films each year, LakeFrontRow.com’s “Your Weekly Short” is getting a facelift. Plan on revisiting one Golden Badger-winning short every week through the end of the festival.
When it burst onto the film festival circuit in 1994, Kevin Smith’s Clerks. received acclaim not just for the economical use of its director’s shoestring credit card debt but because of its societal critique. Smith used a pair of Kwik Stop clerks to prod the social malaise and inbetweener status of Generation-X, spawning a decade’s worth of copycats as well as Smith’s own diminishing career returns. In setting “the Closing Hour” at a Walmart, cartoonist and Flash animator Grey Gerling is concerned with the same generational disillusionment as Smith. His cashier drone frumps behind the counter with an abnormally furrowed brow and the superchain’s familiar blue vest. Between shifts, he spends his breaks daydreaming or reading (most recently a text ominously titled the Dreamtime) neither fully conscious nor asleep. In other words, one could say the cashier’s mental state is a translation of Smith’s slackers.
Gerling is concerned with more than surface level slacking though, as he begins “the Closing Hour” with his character receiving a diagnosis for a brain tumor. We’re never told whether it’s terminal, but the doctor’s hand resting on a shoulder gives enough of an implication. It also isn’t clear whether the clerk’s cancer is what spawns his dark and even debilitating daydreams, as Gerling implies that darkness has long been dormant by crossing over elements. His boss roars orders above the film’s tinny, ambient noises much like the shadow creatures that threaten to swallow the clerk whole and store patrons seem to possess the same gaping maw of a mouth.
Marker strokes are clearly visible in Gerling’s short’s animation, but those seams n also benefit the surreality; even the stillest frames seem to ripple and sway. Most recently, Gerling has begun a new web series over at his personal site, “Tales of BarfQuestion,” but regardless of a matured visual style to the Wisconsin animator, his continued interest in the darker recesses of his creative id link back to this 2008 Golden Badger winner.