Elan awards Snared

By Andrew Payne

payn0069@algonquincollege.com

In a culture dominated by slick, computer-generated animations, it's refreshing to see the charming, warm look of Snared. Drawn entirely by the human hands of Algonquin animation graduate Shane Plante (except for some background colouring), Snared was originally made as a school project last year.

Now it's become much more than that.

An animation awards show in Vancouver, The Elan Awards, just deemed it worthy enough to consider for its best student animation category.

Set in a lush forest wonderland/nightmare, this short film follows three minutes of a native chief's life as he teaches his son how to hunt bunnies with spears. Unfortunately for the young boy, he is taught how to hunt in an animated world where lonely bunnies can fight back with tooth-popping uppercuts. Angered, the chief runs after the offending bunny only to find himself trapped in the dark part of the woods by a larger gang of terrifying misfit bunnies. Then things end just as they are getting very exciting.

But alas, this is the nature of short films ­­­– they are very short.

The quality of Snared rivals the calibre of something you'd see on TV or in the theatres; and the drawing style, well, it's definitely inspired by something everyone grew up with in the theatres.

"I'm a Disney kid all the way," said Plante. "Anything they do that's a feature, I'll buy it in a second."

Like Plante, even Disney itself is taking a big interest in the hand drawn style of animation that it abandoned in 2004. The Princess and the Frog, set to be released in 2009, will be Disney's first traditional animation in five years, during which time it closed down traditional animation studios and concentrated on digital Pixar animations like Toy Story.

Surprisingly, the popular preference for digital animation is not really a matter of saving time and money.

"It's not that there's more advantages from one versus the other," said Derek Bond, Algonquin animation program coordinator. "[Digital] is just a different media, a different tool, a different look. It was the new thing on the block, so everyone jumped on that bandwagon ­– not that there's anything wrong with that."

Traditional and digital both save resources in different ways but take relatively the same amount of effort at the end of it all.

And Plante knows all about the incredible amount of time it takes to make any kind of animation. To craft his three-minute film he dedicated 80-90 hours per week for a whole semester. One night, he stayed at school until 5 a.m. so that he could find the perfect sound effect for his native chief. Scouring free sound effect sites on the internet, he finally found exactly what he was looking for: the grunts and roars of unknown wrestlers.