Black Slide
2021 · 11m · Israel/UK
Directed by Uri Lotan
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A timid boy sneaks onto the infamous "Black Slide" at a water park with his best friend, but what begins as a rites-of-passage dare slowly reveals itself as a story about grief — the boy is processing the death of his mother, and his fear of the slide becomes entangled with a much deeper despair.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A water-slide dare reveals itself as a dead-mom movie, complete with deliberate fingerprint-textured CG to make sure you cry. The New Yorker stamps these things out, but the texture trick is more interesting than the gut-punch they've already telegraphed.
Lotan's fingerprint-on-CG approach echoes the tactile rebellion of Aardman or early Pixar, weaponizing children's-film warmth against grief — a strategy The New Yorker's screening room reliably champions. The slide-as-mourning conceit is on the nose, but the craft argues for itself.
Deliberately leaving fingerprint marks on CG faces to fight Pixar slickness is exactly the kind of texture choice that makes 11 minutes of grief-disguised-as-water-park land. The New Yorker host plus 35K views suggests the disarm-then-devastate strategy is working.
Reviews
A 3D animation with a tactile stop-motion feel isn't anything new, but Lotan's is one of the best I've ever seen... it's this layered approach to the storytelling where Black Slide really feels like it reaches another echelon, serving up not one, but two defining moments for young Eviah and hitting us with a double whammy blow where we feel both relief and devastation.
Black Slide combines an accessible aesthetic, which appeals to both general audiences and animation lovers, with an emotive, layered storyline that should grab the attention of the Academy voters.
Festivals
- Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2022, Cristal Nomination
- British Animation Awards 2022, Audience Award for Best Short Film
- Anima Brussels 2022, Top Prize
- Academy Awards (Oscars) 2023, Shortlisted