Hello there animation fans I thought that i'd do something that I very rarely do and that's review a short film. Now since shorts films in the realm of animation never last longer then ten minuets I thought that to make it bit more fun for me I would review not one but short films and as look would have it two short films came online this morning and so I present to you my review of both Bilby and Bird Karma.
The plot to Bird Karma is very simple it follows a bird who eats alot of fish and one day he finds this orange fish but over the course of the film the bird becomes greedy and it turns into kind of a Road Runner cartoon. Out of the two I can very easily see why this was a short film because there's very little in terms of story. The plot for Bilby is an Australian creature known as a Bilby risks his own life to look after a baby albatross. Again this is a simpler plot but it's one that I think works for this short and out of the two it's one that I could very easily see as a feature film.
This is the easiest part of the review because only one of the short films has acting in it and so starring in Bilby is Dee Bradley Baker as Baby Albatross and David P. Smith as Bilby. I'll full on admit that i wasn't paying to much attention to the acting in Bilby because there was something else that was stunning but from what I heared when I was paying attention to it the acting was fairly solid and alot better then what i thought it would be.
As mentioned Bird Karma has no voice acting in it at all and given how dark that short film gets I think that's a good thing. It also adds to the Road Runner vibe that I was getting from the short because if you remember outside of a few noises neither Wile E. Coyote or the Road Runner had any lines of dialog outside of a few noises from the Road Runner and so to see this short do the same thing really added to that vibe.
The animation for the short films was done by Dreamworks Animation and both ofer a vastly different animation style with Bilby going the 3D CGI route and Bird Karma going for 2D hand drawn animation. The animation for both films is truly great and alot better then the animation seen in a lot of short films but out of the two the animation used in Bilby I thought was alot better and it looked like the kind of animation you'd see in a feature film.
Speaking of Bilby the reason why i think the animation for this film is good is because this was going to be a feature film called Larrikins but it's hard to say how far along in the making of that film the team got before it morphed into Bilby. I'd be so happy if Dreamworks announced that they were going to make Bilby into a feature film because as I was watching it I could see where all the big set pieces would be and how that would play out in a movie.
Both of these shorts are apart of Dreamworks history because they are the first shorts to come out of the companies new shorts programme. I'm so glad that the studio is giving young talent a chance to shine because you know that Disney won't do it unless it's PIXAR so the fact that Dreamworks is taking a chance with new unproven talent can only be a good thing for both the people involved and the animation industry.
If you want to know where you can watch these shorts there going to be on the home video release for the third How To Train Your Dragon movie and given how popular those films are i'm glad that these little known shorts are getting a big push from Dreamworks. It would have been so easy for them to push these shorts under the rug and act like they never happened but the fact that there going to be on DVD for a major film is again a good thing.
In terms of the jokes there are a few goods ones to be found in both films but so few of them are laugh out loud funny. Alot of the really funny jokes do come from Bilby but there is charm to how dark Bird Karma and it's humour is like for example when ever the bird eats a fish you see the fish's skeleton which I thought was cute little gad but it's also a dark as hell joke but like I said the really funny jokes do come from Bilby.
Overall both films do have a certain charm to them and Bird Karma is very freaking dark and I mean very and the ending is darkest ending i've seen in a kids animated short film. Out of the two i'd say Bilby is the best one but that's just me and Bilby gets a 7 out of 10 from me while Bird Karma gets a 5 out of 10 from me.