Short Film 'Borrowed Time' Proves Mature Animation is Possible
Animation is for kids. This is the refrain we hear over and over – beat into our subconscious by decades of CGI fart-fests and cheery anthropomorphic whatevers. I like Disney as much as anyone, but as Ariel sings so emphatically, "I want more."
In television, the move toward dramatic adult animation feels closer than ever. The experimentation of The Simpsons, which at its best finds that tricky balance between funny and poignant, has paved the way for a recent slate of daringly adult comedies. Archer, Rick and Morty, and Bojack Horseman all tackle some weighty and dramatic themes amid their laughs, but when all is said and done, they are still comedies. In the United States, straight drama, for whatever reason, is off limits. Although film animation has flirted with drama before on the fringes (think Fritz the Cat or Heavy Metal), like TV, comedy has been the last hope for adult-minded animated projects. Movies like South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut, and more recently Sausage Fest, certainly push some boundaries, but the main thrust of their power comes from skewering animation's squeaky clean image rather than re-inventing audience perceptions. The directors of the short film "Borrowed Time," Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj, yearn to take that extra step and prove that animation has unlimited potential.
The fact that these trailblazing raconteurs come from a Pixar pedigree makes total sense. Since Toy Story, Pixar has skirted around the edges of mature adult storytelling. Several of their movies like Inside Out, Up, or Wall-E smuggled complex emotions and thematically rich visuals into their four quadrant crowd-pleasers, while still fitting comfortably under the blanket of family entertainment. Produced through the Pixar University Co-op program, "Borrowed Time" takes those mature themes and breaks them from their kiddie constraints.
The animation and design of "Borrowed Time" are gorgeous. Coats and Hamou-Lhadj paint their picture with broad Western iconography, tweaking it just enough to make it their own. More specifically, the character animation is, frankly, incredible. The climactic emotional beat of the film, a moment that requires we empathize with the main character, is shot in close up on the character's face, and if it weren't animated so beautifully and subtly it could've felt incredibly manipulative. Instead, the emotion feels earned and it hits hard. In good stories, emotional connection is king, and the amount of heft this film wrings out of its scant seven minute run time boggles the mind. Maybe one short film at a time we can prove that animation is a medium, not a genre.
Check out the short film for yourself below.
