Sundance Film Festival

“Laying the dead to rest has never been so much trouble.”

So goes the tagline to the newest animated short film from the British filmmaking team known as Smith & Foulkes. Entered at Sundance 2009 in the International Animated Shorts category, This Way Up is a dark but whimsical 8-minute romp about father and son caretakers whose dedication most certainly cannot be called into question. When a boulder flattens their hearse, the two deal with some pretty big physical and philosophical pitfalls to get a dead body into the ground where it belongs.

But this is no Weekend at Bernie’s part three. London-based animation directors Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes—who have created numerous short films, music videos, commercials, and film title sequences— drape their short in washed-out brown/gray tones. This makes sense, coming from the same animation team that produced the animated film-within-a-film for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Slapstick humor dominates the 3D computer-animated This Way Up, so it may be easy to overlook the keen sense of angular design aspects to the characters and objects in the film or some of its handsome symmetrical shots. Although many of the backgrounds are blurred with smoke-like effects, the keen attention to detail becomes more apparent as the setting enters into more colorful surrealistic territory.

With this development, the central joke—that the sturdy British resolve maintains through Hell and high water, literally—just gets funnier. Regardless of the craziness that surrounds them, the caretakers maintain their cool as if this sort of thing happens every day.

Like many of the best animated shorts, this one has no dialogue, using lots of sound effects and an expressive score by John Greswell and Christopher Taylor instead to help tell the story.

Sundance is offering Smith & Foulkes’ This Way Up as a free iTunes download through Jan. 25.