The enthusiasm of the fans is contagious. Or dangerous. Or terribly funny. At least that’s the perspective of Jake Pemberton who creates in his short animation, ‘Moshpit Moves!‘, a kind of parody about the relationship between rock stars and their admirers. Built as a fable in which the characters are animals, the project has the humour and incisiveness needed to please several types of audience. In fact, this is perhaps its great quality – the director creates a project with a touch of social criticism, but without aiming at a much too naive outcome, despite the convention and style of animation he chose. Hence, this structural balance manages to maintain a cohesion between the multitude of verbal or acoustic “stridencies” that make up this explosion of energies fuelled by the fascination of music.
Everything takes the form of a heavy metal ritual in which the star becomes a sort of guru who commands extreme gestures from the fans. But the protagonist’s imagination is perhaps far too rich, and all this show-off leads to increasingly catastrophic and funny consequences.
Although short, without too many narrative ambitions and, just apparently, quite simple in terms of construction, the universe imagined by Jake Pemberton is still catchy, energetic and cynical. The director uses humour-triggering mechanisms specific to animations for the general public to achieve a much more ironic effect: the imperative shouts alternate with whispers through which the star orchestrates the masses of fans; the seeming innocence of the characters contrasts with their “ferocity”; violent musical moments intertwine with short “meditative” pauses, and so on. This mix is led to its finale by the animator with a confident vision, proving a talent more than prepared to approach larger projects. ‘Moshpit Moves!’ is, indeed, a well-done short animation that offers us an invigorating experience. We are more than curious now to see how Jake Pemberton’s skills and imagination will evolve on the parameters of a project with a much more consistent narrative stake.
Share:
