Reviews

Review: The best of the Ottawa International Animation Film Festival

Canadian animations

By PEG ALOI | January 24, 2012

3.0 Stars

The Canadians produce the best animation programs and prove it again with this international selection. The highlights include Québécois Frédérick Tremblay's White Strawberries — imagine the bunnies from David Lynch's Inland Empire cast in a gothic apocalypse made of grey papier maché. From Japan, Japanese animator Atsushi Wada's The Mechanism of Spring is a watercolor fantasy of obese boys observing the cruel transformations of nature. Welshman Ben Cady's The Goat and the Well is a funny, dark parable of animal husbandry, while American Jason Carpenter's The Renter conjures a haunting memoir of rural daycare in pale paint. Eamonn O'Neill's I'm Fine, Thanks is a candy-colored psychotic meditation on urban survival. The finest piece in the program is Pjotr Sapegin's The Last Norwegian Troll, a claymation spectacle narrated by Max von Sydow.

Merce Cunningham at the ICA
When Merce Cunningham started his dance company in 1953, he was a major new force in American Art.
SLIDESHOW: Works by Os Gêmeos at the ICA
The ICA Boston hosts works by Os Gêmeos, on display through November 25, 2012.
Photos: Summer Reunion: Alumni of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company at the ICA
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company presents an alumni reunion show at the ICA theater on July 15, 2011.
Photos: Swoon Art Wall at the ICA
The Institute of Contemporary Art hosts a long-term art wall installation by Swoon, a.ka. Caledonia Curry.
Swoon takes her street art to the ICA 'Wall'
Part punk-rock activist, part classically trained artist, Swoon, a/k/a Caledonia Curry, has sailed the Mississippi with a merry gang on homemade rafts and created earthquake-resistant structures for Haiti.
Slideshow: ''Eva Hesse Studiowork'' at the ICA; Tory Fair's ''Testing a World View (Again)'' at the deCordova
This slideshow accompanies Greg Cook's review of "Eva Hesse Studiowork" at the ICA through October 10, 2011, and Tory Fair's “Testing a World View (Again)" at the deCordova Sculpture Park through April 29, 2012.
Swoon indoors and out
Swoon is one of the most celebrated street artists in the US, so why does her wall of bugs and monsters inside the Institute of Contemporary Art feel so meh?
The ICA's ''Figuring Color''
"Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented," Willem de Kooning argued in the 1950s.
Photos: Black Moth Super Rainbow at ICA
Photos of Black Moth Super Rainbow's performance at the ICA
Cube root
"I've been told it's the largest single piece of glass in the world," Helen Molesworth, the Institute of Contemporary Art's new chief curator, said at a press preview last week.
Review: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
Not so much Werner Herzog's return to his former persnickety, off-the-wall, idiosyncratic feature-film-making self as a reprise of his greatest hits, the overloaded My Son, My Son staggers and sometimes comes to a complete halt.
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Topics: Reviews , claymation, David Lynch, Institute of Contemporary Art, More

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