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Short film
12 min read
The article discusses the festival circuit for animated shorts and how films wait years for wide release. Understanding the economics, distribution challenges, and artistic traditions of the short film format provides valuable context for why exceptional work like Pink Mountain can have under 300 views.
Welcome! It’s another edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This Thursday, we’re talking about a few exciting films.
An incredible amount of animation comes out each year. The student films alone (from CalArts, Gobelins, Geidai) are too numerous for most people to track. Then you’ve got the festival shorts, the indie pilots — and the stuff made in mainstream industries from China to Brazil.
Which is to say that standing out is tough. A lot of this work hits a high technical level, and some of it gets popular enough to overshadow the rest. So, we take note when a film feels particularly special. If it’s obscure to boot, we take even more note.
Sometimes, we discover these standouts on YouTube. Others we find on the festival circuit, which means waiting (usually years) for them to get wide releases online. We check periodically. Often, they still aren’t out.
That changed lately, though, for Pink Mountain (2022). We saw it at a festival three years ago, and it’s stayed with us. It popped up on YouTube last month with unfortunately little fanfare. As of this writing, it has under 300 views, despite its beauty.
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