Little Dark Poet (1999) [N/A]
Featuring:
Sarah Walden, Darren Walsh
Written by:
Mike Booth
Directed by:
Mike Booth
Release Date:
June 17, 1999
Original Title:
Little Dark Poet
Genres:
Animation
Production Companies:
Arts Council of England
Channel 4 Television
Production Countries:
United Kingdom
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 5
A poet, inverting the cliche of the starved artist in the garret, and immediately begins to compose. He has nobly romantic intentions, and begins composing a love poem, which is visualized in the style of silent cinema. Unfortunately, the poet’s darker urges keep intruding. A short film directed by Mike Booth and produced by the Bolebrothers in Bristol UK. Explores the idea of colourisation.
This superlative plasticine animation and live action short is a comic melding of Kafka, Svankmajer, Monty Python and Guy Maddin.Deep, deep underground, a creature, who looks like a lilac frog in a Victorian suit pulled up to his eyes; seated at an endless, teetering desk, stretched like a huge table lamp from the unfathomably creaky bowels of the earth; is woken up by an alarm clock. He is a poet, inverting the cliche of the starved artist in the garret, and immediately begins to compose.He has nobly romantic intentions, and begins composing a love poem, which is visualised in the style of silent cinema, a man and woman in period dress on the grounds of a large country house, the figures in monochrome, their backgrounds unstably colourised.Unfortunately, the poet's darker urges keep intruding - perhaps he has cavern fever - and the period daintiness becomes a crazed battleground of violent lust; the man repeatedly jumping on the woman, not averse to his unruly attentions.The film could be an allegory for the role of desire, fantasy, subjectivity in art; the difficulty of transcending personal interest; the trauma of the isolated artist, the maiming of spirit and art by too much distance.Whatever. The clashes of visual register, and of high and low art, provide fertile comedy and visual wit. Reminiscent of THE great British animation of the last decade or so, Barry Purves' 'Next'.
