Sundance Film Festival

Reflections on a paranoid childhood manifest themselves in images of a one-eyed alien Jesus with an exposed brain, a possessed teenager whose neck turns 180 degrees and morphs into a goat’s head against a pentagram, and constant reappearances of hamburgers and skulls in From Burger It Came, an inventive animated short film from Dominic Bisignano.

Besides being selected in the 2009 Sundance Animated Shorts program, the movie also served as Bisignano’s final thesis film for his master’s degree in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. It combines hand-drawn animation with paintings and computer-generated imagery and shading to create a constantly changing canvas of surreal images.

A phone conversation between the filmmaker and his mother (I am assuming this from the credits) forms the basis of all the colorful and varied visuals, but it is edited together in a strange fashion, further adding to the narrative confusion. Are they recounting events or actually speaking to each other? Some sentences seem to imply both, and the lack of cohesiveness in the conversation is a tricky way to keep everything even more off kilter. Sometimes he even directly addresses the audience.

The fear and paranoia of childhood come through vividly as the son remembers some of his very specific phobias from growing up in middle America in the early 1980s. Catholicism obviously scarred the lad, who was also very frightened of getting AIDS from a hamburger. When he reminds mother of her own fears, she recalls them in a very as-a-matter-of-fact fashion.

Bisignano crams more inner anxiety into 6 minutes than most horror films can muster these days, but always in a whimsical sort of way. From Burger It Came also recalls a more innocent time when rumors could fester and grow into large-scale dread and terror. The way he and his mother look back on the events, however, they never seem in the least bit consequential. It’s funny how differently things look with the passage of time.

Sundance is offering From Burger it Came as a free iTunes download through Jan. 25.

Reflections on a paranoid childhood manifest themselves in images of a one-eyed alien Jesus with an exposed brain, a possessed teenager whose neck turns 180 degrees and morphs into a goat’s head against a pentagram, and constant reappearances of hamburgers and skulls in From Burger It Came, an inventive animated short film from Dominic Bisignano.

Besides being selected in the 2009 Sundance Animated Shorts program, the movie also served as Bisignano’s final thesis film for his master’s degree in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. It combines hand-drawn animation with paintings and computer-generated imagery and shading to create a constantly changing canvas of surreal images.

A phone conversation between the filmmaker and his mother (I am assuming this from the credits) forms the basis of all the colorful and varied visuals, but it is edited together in a strange fashion, further adding to the narrative confusion. Are they recounting events or actually speaking to each other? Some sentences seem to imply both, and the lack of cohesiveness in the conversation is a tricky way to keep everything even more off kilter. Sometimes he even directly addresses the audience.

The fear and paranoia of childhood come through vividly as the son remembers some of his very specific phobias from growing up in middle America in the early 1980s. Catholicism obviously scarred the lad, who was also very frightened of getting AIDS from a hamburger. When he reminds mother of her own fears, she recalls them in a very as-a-matter-of-fact fashion.

Bisignano crams more inner anxiety into 6 minutes than most horror films can muster these days, but always in a whimsical sort of way. From Burger It Came also recalls a more innocent time when rumors could fester and grow into large-scale dread and terror. The way he and his mother look back on the events, however, they never seem in the least bit consequential. It’s funny how differently things look with the passage of time.

Sundance is offering From Burger it Came as a free iTunes download through Jan. 25.