Results tagged “chrislandreth”

The Worldwide Short Film Festival has two things perpetually working against it. One, any feature-length program of short films, in any context, is almost necessarily going to be a mixed bag; there will be one or two works of sustained brilliance, two or three self-satisfied efforts that try your patience despite their limited lengths, and then a handful of other interesting but mostly unremarkable entries. Two, the WSFF—this year running June 16–21—always comes at the end of Toronto's busy spring festival season, following Images (early April), Sprockets (mid-April), Toronto Jewish (late April), Hot Docs (early May), and Inside Out (mid-May); it's sometimes received as an afterthought in the scheme of things.

In the opening voiceover for his Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, Chris Landreth explains, "I live in Toronto, a city in Canada where I see way too many shades of grey for my own good health." This line occurred to us as we attended the official unveiling of Toronto's new "street furniture" at City Hall Monday morning, a celebration of the all-new shades of grey about to trickle onto our streets.

Torontoist was very saddened to learn of yesterday's passing of Canadian animation legend Ryan Larkin.

Between the groundbreaking (and Oscar-nominated) Walking in 1969 and his equally revolutionary follow-up, Street Musique, three years later, Ryan Larkin cemented his status as among the most daring and brilliant animators of his time, taking hand-drawn animation to a previously-unseen level of surreal impressionism. He was the rising star of the NFB, the protégé of, and successor to, Norman McLaren, but the pressure to top his earlier triumphs exacerbated his already-present problems with drug- and alcohol-dependency. He left the NFB in 1978, and after a "hazy" decade during which he managed to get himself off of cocaine, Larkin took up panhandling outside (the greatest restaurant in the world) Schwartz's deli in Montréal. This tragic fall from grace was chronicled in Chris Landreth's excellent 2004 Academy Award-winner for Best Animated Short, Ryan, which renewed attention on Larkin, who nevertheless chose to continue his long stint on The Main.

Our boy reporter called him "arguably the greatest Canadian animator ever" after viewing the Best of Norman McLaren during the Toronto International Film Festival, so you might be interested to see that starting tonight the NFB are celebrating 65 years of animation production with nightly, free of charge events.

When a movie festival runs for five days and shows over 230 films, calling it 'short' seems a little misleading. But the organizers of the World Wide Short Film Festival have decided to go ahead and use the 'short' qualifer to describe the bigtime, 11-years and counting event. Starting tonight until this Sunday, June 14-19, films like Taika Waititi's "Sons of War," Craig Goodwill's "My Own Revolution," Jeff Moneo's "Plastic Bitch," Monica Rho's "Stationary," Brian Stockton's "All the Teachers I Have Known," and Michael White's "Branding Mupatu" are the highlights. And as anyone can guess from that cut-and-paste job, the only film we recognize here is Chris Landreth's now famous Academy-Award winning "Ryan." But you can find out more by buying tickets at venues Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor St W), Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles St W), Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave), and Emmanuel College (Queen's Park Circle). Or online here.

may avenge the Oscar loss of its namesake character lo those many years ago.