Monday, January 30, 2012

Short Film: Yellow Cake (Canada, 2010)

In 2010, Canadian independent animated film maker Nick Cross made two excellent Flash animated films, Pig Farmer and this one, Yellow Cake. Both are excellent little films more than worthy of being presented as the latest Short Film of the Month here at A Wasted Life; Yellow Cake is the chosen film only because it is the first of the two that we saw, and therefore gets first rights. The filmmaker himself explains Yellow Cake as "a lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth," which is as good as description as any. (Cross seems to like short and sweet descriptions; for Pig Farmer, he is equally curt: "A simple tale of a wayward soul, awash in an ocean of tragedy and regret.") But Yellow Cake offers a lot more than its simple description promises: both funny and tragic, it touches upon happiness, greed, revenge and more, putting all its themes within a spiraling tale that leads to an inevitable tragic conclusion. It's a good film, and much, much darker than its pleasant and cute animation style would indicate.
Nick Cross, who tied the knot with Marlo Meekins on 1 October, 2009, was born on August 17, 1971, in Brampton, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto. A 1994 graduate of Sheridan College, where he studied illustration, he got his first job in the animation field in 1996, a field that he is still active in. He has a nice blog at which one can take a look at the various projects he has worked on.
On his own – as in not as part of a job – Cross is currently working on completing his first full-length animation film, and independent production entitled Black Sunrise. Going by the trailer embedded below – and by the quality of his past short films – it should be a truly interesting film once finished. A Wasted Life looks forward to the day it is finished – but until then, enjoy Yellow Cake, the Short Film of the Month for January 2012 here at A Wasted Life.

Trailer to Black Sunrise:

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