Genres: Animation

Using stock footage from NFB’s Nature Studies, puppetry, and real-life clips, Francis Leeming and Cathy Quinn draw an analogy of women as flowers who need nurturing by positive female role models. Entitled “The Untilled Story,” the film is a pun that plays on notions of Mother Nature and Man’s Science and technology. Part of Five Feminist Minutes.

Based on a bus ride across Canada, both the sound track and visuals are content-laden collages that celebrate the work of alternative community cultural groups – women’s bands, poets, artists unions, and community radio – against a backdrop of unemployment. Music by Clive Robertson accompanies the cut-out animated images.

This amusing animation, utilizing music and sound effects, begins with a group of sleeping angels who wake up to enjoy a picnic on the clouds. They are interrupted by a flight of bombers. As they move higher and higher into the sky they are interrupted by missiles, then by armed satellites. A flying horse and a hungry cloud contribute to the solution of these war machines in an ending that is imaginative and thoughtful.

A shy person, frightened at social settings, makes several attempts to communicate and then succeeds in a bizarre and unusual way. Deliberately focusing on the one who rarely gets much attention and recognition; the theory is that inside every introvert there is an extrovert and vice versa, and that there are myriad ways of expressing human experience, not always through conventional channels.