‘Ryan’ and the Plight of Great Shorts

This year the Academy Award for best animated short film went to a 14-minute wonder entitled “Ryan” and its creator, Chris Landreth. It is an example of why it is worth the time and effort to seek out short films, but since shorts rarely get beyond very limited showings in art house theaters in large cities, it is difficult to recommend them, given the very small angle of opportunity for public access.

“Ryan” is about the disintegration of a delicate creative soul dissolved in alcohol. The filmmaker, himself an artist, and a character in the film, interviews Ryan Larkin, iconic graphic artist from the 70s, in a skid-row cafeteria in the Mission area of Montreal. The interview portrays Landreth’s fear of what can happen to a
creative person’s life when one’s creativity goes away.

Within seconds of the beginning of the film, the message, both verbally and visually, is plain. Looking at himself in a bathroom mirror, Landreth talks about the slings and arrows which hurt him as a child. As he says this, scars and gouges appear on his face. He wears his pain. All this happens in the first minute.

The state-of-the-art software and techniques used to create “Ryan” are extraordinary. One understands them intuitively. Ryan is himself, literally, a shell of pasted-together pieces. A sense of realism is introduced by a shifting focus which gives the impression of the cinematographer’s craft, not the animator’s. Other characters, visually flattened or disabled by their mental or emotional circumstances, walk through the meeting room in the film. Larkin’s lucidity and acceptance of his circumstances play out graphically during the interview, showing his work at the height of his career, as well as people important to him, displayed in varying graphic styles.

But, with all this wonder, my description may be as close as you can get to seeing this fine short. I attended an Academy Awards party attended by people in the industry. When “Ryan” won its Oscar, I let up a holler of joy, but no
one else in the room had a clue about what it—or any other short—was, and that was a room of film industry people!

“Shorts” or short films are to features what poetry is to a novel: a condensed view of life. A focused artistic statement. Some, like Landreth’s, deliver more than many feature-length films. Yet most people never get to see them. Even with a long list of cash-winning prizes and awards at competitions and festivals from Canada to Sweden to Spain and many others, the best of short films will have difficulty being seen by more than a small percentage of the population.

I have wondered why good shorts are not coupled with feature-length films. But consider how fearful a distribution company would be that an audience would like the short film more than the feature presentation!

What about putting a bunch of shorts onto one DVD and marketing them all together that way? Putting 20 wildly different short films together may fit onto the disk, but it can be a marketing nightmare. Why would someone want to pay for all of them when only one is important to the buyer?

Some theaters do create sets of shorts that deal with a particular topic. That way, you can have a pack of artistic statements in the course of an evening. The topic rules.

One thing someone can do is to call that small theater in the community that shows old and new limited distribution films, as well as old classics (these theaters are often known as “art houses”) and ask if it is going to have a series of short films. You can start by looking for “Ryan.” If you are lucky, they will have some evenings planned. Good luck!