Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a new feature on LakeFrontRow.com that will showcase one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker each week, every week. Brace thy face.
“People are animals” is an admittedly reductive distillation of Milwaukee filmmaker Dan Boville’s short, “Secrets of Animal Navigation,” but it’s hard to ignore his title in light of an overabundance of human-shaped animals. Told through what a Vimeo description enthusiastically refers to as “paper cut animation,” the film has an undeniable charm in its dated photographs. In fact, many of the images Boville selects and alters seem ripped right from back issues of National Geographic or from a time when smoking ads were a thing in LIFE magazine. Thanks again, Death of Print Journalism.
The palpable nostalgia kick might be why so much of “Secrets of Animal Navigation” feels like a cultural time capsule from the 1970’s, though one could also blame the continuous percussion of a Buddy Rich-styled drum solo. The short’s only musical cues (or sound for that matter), the solo begins as a low rumble in the toms before exploding into a full-on chaotic mass of crashes and rolls, a mashup of craft store collages and acid jazz breaks. The resulting combination is more than a little sexual in nature, though we probably didn’t require the thrusting of an “erupting” volcano to tell us that.
That same volcano, with all its shaking, also draws our attention to how Boville is altering these magazine pages. Along with a handful of other moments (e.g. a “dancing” Eiffel tower, idigenous peoples with markered faces), the kinetic volcano makes for a terrific albeit fleeting cinematic moment in “Secrets of Animal Navigation.” Boville’s animated images feel deliberate; it’s the rest of the jumble that seems so disregarded. From European explorers to smoking fishermen to monkeys and tigers and at least one pair of copulating beasts to a broader frame in the cosmos itself (including a clever re-visualization of a spinning Earth), Boville tosses his visual elements into a soupy mixture of magazine clippings and lets his drum solo stir the ingredients. Except none of the ingredients feel measured. Is this a story of human devolution into substance abuse? A criticism of capitalism and American avarice? Guns, Germs and Steel by way of Highlights? The whole piece seems more like an abuse of experimental film’s open-ended nature rather than an attempt at fully developing what is a sexy, raw concept at heart.