Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a LakeFrontRow.com feature that showcases one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker each week, every week. Brace thy face.
This is Umberto. Well, this is Anna Krutzik’s short film “This is Umberto.” Umberto is a plastic doll, according to the text-to-speech software’s narrator — and the credits. Umberto’s been having a difficult time in his world of jungle cats and creatures, and although I’d love to say more, Umberto has a list of requirements before you can properly meet him. You’d better wash your hands.
Monitoring one’s hygiene before meeting a doll seems like a bit much, and “This is Umberto.” is definitely absurd; a shot of Paprika the cat engulfing Umberto’s head with her jaws takes on an epic quality in its magnified state. Regardless of whether its doll’s fate may be determined by the mouth of a feline seems beside the point, but “This is Umberto.” is preoccupied with death all the same. Krutzik turns her eschatological lens towards how “forgotten” a species like manatees can be and, eventually, to the autonomy and existence of Umberto himself.
“This is Umberto” never feels stiff — despite its rigid framing and stilted voiceover — because its narrator constantly traffics in the absurd. Just look at Umberto’s list of don’ts: abortion, lynchings, public singing, bread pudding, Canada. Those oddities turn into self-awareness when Krutzik loses interest in her own timeline (see: the “Another Yesterday” title card), and the zither in the background plays like an intro to a little-seen PBS anthology series, disarming the would-be downers to come. After all, Umberto seems like a pretty cool guy.