Reviews, credits & stillsAFI Award-winning animated short is brilliant and visually mesmerising. Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Country: Australia Director: Athony Lucas 5 stars Of all the marvels given to us by animation, the art form is at its most sublime when making the impossible appear utterly plausible. The ballet-dancing hippos of Fantasia, for instance. Or the flying baby elephant of Dumbo. And when Jiminy Cricket sang When You Wish Upon a Star at the beginning of Pinocchio it proved beyond question that even insects have souls. In his brilliant, visually mesmerising short film, local director Anthony Lucas has us believing that bulky contraptions with iron-girder rib cages and massive air screws weighing thousands of tonnes can sail through the air with effortless grace. Using sepia tones, silhouettes and a variety of animation techniques, this vision of Victorian-era "retro-futurism" looks like the kind of automated, mechanised world of tomorrow that Jules Verne or H. G. Wells might have conjured up had they had access to computers. It's highly textured, richly detailed and exquisite to look at. Rarely has the beauty of machines been so memorably evoked. Beyond its astonishing visuals, though, is an intriguing story of adventure and moral crisis, written by Mark Shirrefs (best known for children's TV shows such as Spellbinder and The Girl from Tomorrow) that essentially fits a feature-worthy storyline into a compact, unhurried 26 minutes. With a plague ravaging his country and threatening his wife, navigator Jasper Morello takes part in a perilous expedition through a sky of floating islands, drifting clouds and remote transmitter beacons. The destination is a mysterious land where a cure will hopefully be found. The journey, however, is fraught with danger as the crew faces death and a troubling moral dilemma on their return trip. The film won a richly deserved AFI Award for Best Animated Short last week and will hopefully help spur Lucas on to grace us with more films. Jasper Morello is apparently the first part of a trilogy and a full-blown feature is on the cards. Here's to seeing more of this vision splendid. Jim Schembri, December 1, 2005
Other linkshttp://www.jaspermorello.com/gazette/
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