Slash FF review: Wild Animal (2024)
Slash Film Festival
Fantastic Shorts Competition
As Terrence Malick suggested in his film The Tree of Life (2011), evolution is influenced by two types of forces. One of them, the primal ones, is the forces of nature that are rough, but train the species for the struggle to survive. The other ones are the forces of mercy, and they influence the conscious decisions to avoid overkill and to spare lives if possible. Those forces are often in collision, and the art of life is to find balance.
Nature and nurture once again come as primary topics of Tianyun Lyu’s animated short Wild Animal that plays at the Slash Film Festival in Vienna. Both are pretty brutal, as the setting is the Mongolian steppe in winter, and the example is a clash between wolves and hunters. The question is, as usual, who is the titular wild animal and the intruder that disrupts the balance.
The father wants to protect his young son and to equip him with the skills necessary to survive in harsh conditions, so he teaches him to shoot with a rifle. After witnessing the consequences of the wolves’ raid on the villagers’ flock of sheep, the hunt is being organised, and the father takes the boy with him and his mates. The child, being a child, expresses some more noble intentions with an animal caught in a trap and an orphaned cub, but is denied by the elders. When the son returns to the wild to “make up” for his inaction, the father embarks on a search for him, willing to kill everything that stands in his way…
What works best in Wild Animal is contrasts. The human characters are designed more realistically, while the wolves are drawn more abstractly. That particular decision is contrasted with choices of music themes, a drone noise for humans and ethnic themes for wolves. The characters are hand-drawn, but the movements are rendered on a computer, and they progress in a perfect rectilinear way. Also, the characters move, but the backgrounds remain static.
In the end, Wild Animal serves as a portfolio work, something for the USC School of Cinematic Arts Tianyun Liu to show skills in animating, storyboarding and directing a short animated film. The story itself hits a well-known chord, and even the “deus ex machina” solution for the ending, although imbued with at least a hint of spirituality, does not come as much of a surprise. But for a student’s work, the whole thing is pretty decent.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 12’ 36’’
Country: USA
Language: no dialogue
Directed by: Tianyun Lyu
Storyboard by: Tianyun Lyu
Voices: Tianze Lyu, Yadong Lyu, Kevin Remy
Animation by: Tianyun Lyu, Nuodi A, Guyu Liang, Hongyin Ju, Mingwei Ma, Yihong Pan,
Kaiting Zhang, Xuan Fan
Music by: Chengyang Louzhang
Sound by: Lu Lu, Kevin Remy
Produced by: Xiaowen (Daisy) Wu
Production company: USC School of Cinematic Arts
