Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a LakeFrontRow.com feature that showcases one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker all while stretching the definition of “weekly.” Brace thy face.
It would be absurd to suggest the titular creature in Milwaukee’s Kate Balsley’s “The Cucaranchula” is some grotesque manifestation of creative anxieties, a hairy-legged totem of freedom of expression, or just plain writer’s block. But I’m going to anyway.
When aspiring novelist Paige (Taylor Lhamon) invites pedantic Professor Bradley (Zach McLain) over for notes on an as-yet-untitled project, an awkward dalliance (complete with electric candle) begets an extremely unproductive discussion. On the heels of his passive-aggressive jabs, Professor Bradley’s exit is interrupted by Balsley’s stop-motion creation, which has emerged from Paige’s bathroom to explore the nether regions of his jeans. With the Cucaranchula in tow, Bradley takes off in his junker — one of many production elements Balsley switches out for storybook-style animation. But his troubles have only begun.
“The Cucaranchula” brought home several awards in 2012, including the Milwaukee Short Film Festival’s Artistic Achievement Award and Best Comedy at Appleton’s Wildwood Film Festival. Both accolades are appropriate given Balsley’s genre mixture. Her swooping, omniscient camera drifts about Paige’s apartment like a ghost, a half-supernatural affectation that adds a mythic nature to the Cucaranchula’s hijinks. Crawling in and out of kitchen sinks and drainage pipes, it’s both a hairy abomination and a cute guardian for the unsuspecting Paige, who fishes her discarded manuscript from the trash. Her naming of the short story after the creature doesn’t feel like it’s too on-the-nose either. Balsley plays it as inspiration from nonsense, her writer unaware of the eight-legged muse lurking in the apartment plumbing.
http://vimeo.com/79617854