Snack and Drink (2000)

Director:

Bob Sabiston

Genre:

Animation | Short

Plot:

An austistic boy visits a convenience store for a "snack and drink"; we see his rituals, particularly the mixing of flavors of soda, with a wild variety of animation styles. |

Plot Keywords:

Autism | Computer Animation | Convenience Store | Rotoscoping | Independent Film

Cast

Ryan Power

...

Himself

Runtime:

4 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

Flat Black Films

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Waking Life (2001)

Visually clever and impressive but the substance (in terms of dialogue) could have been better

Two guys are walking the street and decide to go for a drink and some sweets. One of the guys is autistic - rambling and babbling and obsessively filling his cup with a little bit of drink from each dispensers. The other guy follows him chatting about what he likes and trying to get to grips with who the fellow is. I came to this film not sure what it was about and was surprised by how short it was. In terms of substance it is apparent that the focus here is a guy who has some sort of obsessive compulsion as he repeats trailers he saw, phrases he has heard and seems to repeat rituals on a daily (or more) basis. The film never really probes deeper than just showing us that this is who he is and deeper stuff is only touched on by an unanswered line of dialogue that runs over the end credits (is it true you locked yourself in the bathroom to stop yourself killing your brother?).

In this way I was rather left in the cold by the film because it didn't do anything with the subject other than really show him – although whether or not this is a weakness I suppose depends on your preconceptions prior to seeing the film. Despite being a little let down by this aspect of it I did think that the animation was worth seeing the film for. I'm pretty ignorant of technical names and so on but this appeared to be the same 'drawing over digital frames' technique that has recently been used in the film Waking Life. It is not as clean and clear as in that film but it has more imagination, using extremes at times or other times just seeming to animate what is there and not add anything. This makes it interesting and impressive but, for me, not quite enough to really cover the lack of substance.

Overall this is an interesting film but not one that really won me over. It was all over too quickly so that, just as I started to get a grip on who the characters involved were, they were gone. The animation makes up for it and bit and is impressive and imaginative but many other viewers might feel that the dialogue could have been more telling than it was, acting to add substances to the visual experience.