By Doug Cummings
AFI FEST Daily News

Now that animated features have become pillars of commercial cinema, and the wonders of digital imagery—anthropomorphic animals, lavish environments, casts of thousands—have become ubiquitous in movies, animation seems as commonplace as the evening news. But animation is one of the oldest and most labor-intensive forms of motion pictures; its practitioners were solitary and obsessive filmmakers—cinema’s original Frankensteins—who painstakingly granted the illusion of life to an array of materials, devoting years of their lives to producing a few moments of flickering movement.

This year’s AFI FEST offers no less than four films—including our Opening Night film—that are animated, and further, were all created with a technique called stop-motion. THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, WEIRD CAROLERS (in the LUNCHFILMS program), IN THE ATTIC and A TOWN CALLED PANIC all use miniature sets and physical props moved and photographed a frame at a time. They hearken back to cinema’s early days (see the works of Ladislaw Starewicz or Lotte Reiniger) and inject a much-needed human, hand-tailored element into the digitally artificial, mathematically calibrated, pristine world of contemporary animation. Not only do they evoke an older cinema, they also evoke the joys of childhood: stories fashioned from everyday clutter and ordinary materials brought to life with vivid imaginations.

Wes Anderson visualizes THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, Roald Dahl’s story about a clever fox who steals chickens (an act that inadvertently threatens the lives of his family and animal neighbors), as an autumnal montage of flaming sunsets and crisp, golden fields receding to the horizon. Citing as a direct influence Starewicz’s brilliant 1930 stop-motion feature THE TALE OF THE FOX (available on DVD in France and the UK), Anderson uses his furry puppets to highlight the presence of invisible human hands by their unmotivated, rippling hairs and highly expressive, but herky-jerky movements. Anderson is a filmmaker known for fastidious attention to composition and design, and the film is a study in precision. But the viewer is constantly made aware of the presence of animators, puppeteers and technicians (and not only because the film’s lighting inspires self-reflexive gags); for a movie with a cast of puppets, it’s a celebration of people and their craftsmanship.

Brent Green’s stunning stop-motion short, WEIRD CAROLERS, uses a paper-mâché puppet and a dimly lit set to create an expressionist vision of Beethoven’s final days writing his 9th symphony. The atmosphere of a cramped Salzberg apartment with looming shadows is almost tactile with its emphasis on wooden floors, twisted mirrors and metal doorknobs, pans, and bedposts. Its fragmented spaces are disorienting while Green’s incantatory, poetic narration describes the nearly deaf maestro in fits of creative hysteria pounding on surfaces to feel the vibrations and gnawing on his piano. It would be a nightmarish vision were it not for the beauty of the creative act itself and the soaring, victorious use of “Ode to Joy” at the film’s climax; the contrasting tones generate a powerful tension.

Jiri Barta has long been considered one of the world’s master stop-motion animators (check out his astonishing 1985 cubist masterpiece, THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN on Kino DVD). Although he’s known for a darker, more Eastern European and experimental aesthetic, IN THE ATTIC is by and large a whimsical and family-friendly foray into commercial territory (save for its villain’s disembodied head, Soviet-style doublespeak, and bizarre legion of grotesqueries). Barta—as he often does—mixes live action and stop-motion freely, saving the animation for the magical world of “living” toys and domestic storage props secluded in an enormous loft above an inquisitive young girl and her down-to-earth grandmother. The purpose of the film, Barta has written, “is to evoke a sense of creative imagination . . . we have shown how everyday objects can magically transform themselves,” and one of the film’s joys is discovering how things such as a vacuum cleaner, an old stove and a bunch of rags can provide the stuff of drama.

If Barta’s film emphasizes childsplay, A TOWN CALLED PANIC elevates it to the level of manic surrealism with its cheap plastic figurines tottering about and shrieking in high-pitched agitation, perpetually on the losing end of an off-kilter world. Bright and colorful, deliciously tinker-toy but surprisingly sophisticated, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s fast-paced, unpredictable, and highly inventive feature (based on their popular TV series of five-minute shorts) is infectious fun. Three characters—the neurotic Cowboy, the impetuous Indian, and the straight man, er, Horse—express a degree of pathos seldom seen outside of a delirious group of over-sugared juveniles way past their bedtime. But look more closely, and the film’s expert timing, elegant visual simplicity, and narrative organization belies an adult sensibility.

Each of these films are not only captivating and visually unique, but they clearly express the fun of making them. Who needs a computer, they seem to ask, when you’ve got puppets, mashed-up paper, discarded appliances, and piles of clay to play with?

Doug Cummings is Editor of AFI FEST Daily News in 2009; he’s a film critic who also blogs about world cinema at filmjourney.org.