This short is featured on the Animation Show Vol. 3 DVD.
Tony Comley's ABIGAIL won a special distinction award at the Annecy Animation Festival, a pretty nice feat for a student film. It begins with an airplane falling from the sky with its engines on fire. The passengers in coach sing cheerily "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" as they plummet to their deaths. A man longing for a woman in a photograph leaves the chaos in coach for the more refined first class, where things really get weird.
The nightmarish tale mixes tones in an off-putting way. Haunting moments are followed by jokes. Clues to the meaning are casually littered about, but as the film progresses they seem more and more random. Comley gives us little to decipher his code, leaving us to fill in the blanks for ourselves. This isn't intrinsically bad, but without hints the viewer gets to the point where they get lost as the story twists and turns. As for the animation, the rotoscope-style, similar to WAKING LIFE and A SCANNER DARKLY, is a bit stilted.
With a lot of experimental animation, one takes what they bring in. The more obscure the references, especially when no overall theme is clear, the smaller the audience becomes. Comley says the film is about how we deal with the things we cannot control. Using that idea, which isn't clear in the film, gives the film a discernable through line, but even that theme breaks down in cynical personal quirks.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
