Animation Exploration: "June Night"

The production of animation might be better suited to a time of protective isolation than live action, but imagining the sheer work of putting things together one frame at a time leads to supposing a lot of files are being sent back and forth. (So far as “yearning for another time” with its potential risks goes, I’m aware that while animation can set up close conversations conventional methods have a hard time handling “crowds.”) The shorter a piece of animation is the easier it is to imagine individual people managing it, though, which reminds me of works close to home from the National Film Board of Canada.

A few days ago, I ran across a pointer to a new NFB short called “June Night,” credited to Mike Maryniuk, and was a bit intrigued by descriptions of cutout animation featuring the silent movie comedian Buster Keaton. The animation did give quite a sense of “reproduced images,” but I wondered about “time coming unmoored in isolation”; it did seem to last for much longer than the advertised running time would suggest. Maybe that just means something about it was going over my head. I was conscious of being aware of Keaton without having seen much of his work, stuck in a noisy era; I could spare a thought, though, of my latest effort to justify my Netflix subscription by watching Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It dealt with a good bit more than just “the assembly line” I’d known it took on while casting back as well, and I was intrigued to spot a Mickey Mouse doll and think of two “worldwide comedic icons” meeting. By the end of the short, in any case, I’d recognized one of the first works featuring Keaton I’d seen, his much later short “The Railrodder.” That piece also happening to be an NFB production gave an odd sense that having chosen him for this new one felt less arbitrary all of a sudden.