Speed Dating
2015 · 11m
Directed by Meghan Artes
Genres: animation, comedy, romance
Tones: humorous, tender, whimsical
Stop-motion Ava, single for too long and afraid of never finding love, tries the efficient method: speed dating.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Stop-motion romance is basically the safe choice of safe choices—cute puppet, cute premise, cute resolution. Unless Artes does something genuinely perverse with the form, this reads like what people *think* indie animation should be, not what it could be.
There's a lineage here worth respecting—the handmade aesthetic, the formal constraint of stop-motion as a meditation on patience and repetition, the way animation lets you literalize emotional states. If Artes treats the medium as more than window dressing, this could sit nicely in the animation canon.
The choice to use stop-motion for a speed-dating narrative is the whole thing—that tactile, frame-by-frame construction becomes a metaphor for the painstaking, almost absurd labor of searching for connection. If the pacing of the animation *is* the pacing of loneliness, that's the decision that makes this work.
Reviews
The film shines as soon as it moves to the pub. The editing and Russ Williamson's role as matchmaker add vitality and humour to the story.