Ice Ages
2004 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Howie Shia
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, a man sits in a pub watching ice melt in his glass, in a brief animated study of anxiety and foreboding rendered in pen and ink.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A minute of a guy watching ice melt sounds like the most boring premise imaginable—which is exactly why it works; Shia weaponizes tedium into genuine dread, turning a pub into a pressure chamber where nothing happens and everything matters.
The economy of means here is devastating—pen and ink rendered with such formal restraint that the melting ice becomes a meditation on time and mortality, sittuated squarely in the lineage of Miyazaki's quieter moments and the NFB's tradition of poetic abstraction.
What elevates this from concept to craft is the decision to let the animation breathe in real time with the ice—no shortcuts, no montage—forcing the viewer into the character's suspended anxiety through pure durational choice.