Meanwhile
2014 · 5m · United Kingdom
Directed by Stephen McNally
Genres: animation, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Four city dwellers, each lost in their own memories, regrets and frustrations, traverse an urban landscape in a bold-colored blend of CG 3D and 2D drawn animation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The hybrid animation thing feels like it's trying to have it both ways—CG precision meets hand-drawn vulnerability—but it lands somewhere safe, a formally interesting premise that doesn't quite rupture into the strange territory it hints at.
McNally's collage of 3D and 2D materials sits squarely in a lineage of city-form films grappling with modern alienation, and the restraint here—five minutes of interlocking solitudes rendered through deliberate aesthetic collision—shows the kind of formal discipline that makes experimental work resonate rather than merely provoke.
The decision to splice rigid geometric CG against organic drawn passages is the entire film's skeleton; it's the one formal choice that makes the melancholy architecture sing, turning what could've been a conventional meditation on urban loneliness into something textured and strange.