Reviews

DN Picks: Jun12

The (supposedly) summer month of June provided two animated opportunities to contemplate religion, humanity and greed; firstly, DN alumni Jossie Malis launched his Kickstarter campaign for Bendito Machine by releasing the long awaited fourth instalment and secondly French directing trio Nobrain explored planetary birth and the rapid evolution of its populous into exploitative war mongers in The Gloaming. There was more crowd funding excitement with Sean Dunne launching (and successfully completing) a campaign for his documentary feature debut Oxyana. We took our best shot at predicting who’d walk away triumphant from the thousands of submissions in the Vimeo Awards (5 out of 13 is that bad is it?), and balls to the wall rap combo Die Antwoord returned with another glimpse into their truly bizarre world. Our excitement over the computational documentary Clouds: beta confirmed our card-carrying geek status, which was compounded by our video game and zombie pick ZombiU which transformed London into a playground for the undead. We kept the tone horrific with Daniel Kanemoto’s animated tribute to the Evil Dead trilogy. Gia Coppola got all movie referential in her fashion film Writers Block and finally, we found it impossible to resist the charm of Chintis Lundgren’s silly animation about birds.