René Jodoin

The Bronswik Affair

This funny yet serious short film demonstrates the effectiveness of advertising and the marketing machine. Its comic appeal lies in the characters and the absurd situations they find themselves in, but it also shines a harsh light on our tendency towards needless consumerism prompted by a steady flow of commercials.

Monsieur Pointu

Monsieur Pointu would like to play his fiddle. But the fiddle has other ideas.

Hunger

16mm. In one of the first films to use computer animation, director Peter Foldès depicts one man’s descent into greed and gluttony. Combining traditional and computer animation (one of the first to use it!), Peter Foldes, through clever metamorphosing images and powerful line drawings, provides a moralistic tale of one man’s enormous appetite and selfish consumerism. Growing more corpulent and repulsive, his indigestion leads to a nightmare where he is consumed in a hell of emaciated bodies. By extension, this film indicts affluent nations and individuals in a world where many starve.

Balablok

Blocks and balls fight simply because they are different, until their battle reduces everyone to the same shape.

Horsing Around

Humorous, full of unimaginable finds, this animated short invites the viewer to follow the antics of a horse trying to acquire a force equivalent to that of a horsepower.

Series 4

This experimental short documents the clash, sometimes obsessive, sometimes glorifying, between humans and their mechanized environment. Using photographs, the animator creates varying perspectives through optical manipulation and changing colour, achieving bold and provocative effects.

Multiplication 1

An elementary school film on multiplication based on the theories of Professor Zoltan Dienes.

Tête en fleurs

Line drawings, flowing freely across the screen, suggest a head-in-the-clouds feeling as Claude Gauthier recalls a lost but sweet love of other days. Part of the Contemporary Songs of French Canada series.

Oddball

A child founds a strange ball.

Spheres

This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.

Cerveau gelé

Musician and composer 'Claude Dubois' presents his view of the effects of the growth of urban areas, specifically industrialization and overuse of non-human elements resulting in a need to overly control how we as people live within this environment. Human images are interspersed with more controlled mechanized ones. Those human images are first free flowing, then floundering under that mechanization, then ultimately trapped into chaos or into death.

The Fox and the Crow

A satirical, updated take on the classic Jean de La Fontaine fable.

A Child in His Country

A childhood fantasy where dreams carry a boy far to adventure. He arrives in Canada on an ocean liner and is, in turn, a hunter of polar bear, a cowboy, a hockey star, and a swimmer.

Notes on a Triangle

In this short animation film the triangle achieves the distinction of principal dancer in a geometric ballet. The triangle is shown splitting into some three hundred transformations, dividing and sub-dividing with grace and symmetry to the music of a waltz. The film's artist and animator is René Jodoin, whose credits include Dance Squared and several collaborations with Norman McLaren.