Revenge is Cold: Woody the Matchbox dreams of becoming a lighter and hopes he can fulfil this ambition with the help of Antus the Cactus, whom he meets in the Mexican desert. Love Then First Fight: Bob Brakinlot is a criminal looking to go straight; when he meets Blossom Shirtz, a shirt whose life has been ripped apart, he gets the chance to move on if only they can put their pasts behind them. Keep Going: A young egg escapes from his fridge to go on a quest to meet Michael Jackson, only to meet a gorilla who is searching for his lost family. These collections of stories are told in animations, based on scripts by young children.
Comprised of three separate short films, this main film was entirely written and storyboarded by teenagers with no changes to the content. Obviously the animation and money didn't come from them but you get my gist. Revenge is Cold is weirdly funny and has plenty of nice touches to the animations that reference westerns and movies that made it interesting. The characters are weird enough to be interesting and the humour is witty and off-kilter enough to make it an very enjoyable little short. Love Then First Flight is a love story where two troubled characters meet and try to make a relationship work. Generally it is well written and develops a nice story pretty well. The writing allows for some surprisingly edgy stuff to be brought out. The only major problem with it is that the animation is not great. I can see what they were trying to do with the atmospheric black and white, but the graining look only took away from the animation as it was hard to see and difficult to really appreciate.
Continuing this trend, Keep Going shows a great deal of imagination and off-kilter imagination blended with the simple creativity of 13-year-old Acai. Hope's animation is yet again very good managing to have characters and a feel that were created by a child while also being fun to watch and interestingly delivered; worth seeing for the sight of an egg doing some Michael Jackson moves! Overall this was a very enjoyable 20 minutes for a variety of reasons. It looked great and featured three of the most imaginative stories I have seen for a very long time. I doubt it will be easy to hunt down, although the "Animate!" website may have the shorts available for individual download and I do recommend that you do that because they are really worth seeing.