During his workshop, Davide Giurlando lead the auditorium’s audience on a 360° trip around the world of advertising. The advertising world, unlike the cinema world that seems very distant from it in many ways, is totally immersed in the chaos of modernity. Animation has always had a sort of neurotic vein, reflection of the torments and obsessions of contemporary society, and this is echoed in advertising as well. Just think that most of great animators are also advertisers at the same time. Davide Giurlando introduced the audience to a selection of four short films about the world of advertising and the effects that it has in our lives, almost like a contamination which gives birth to a contrast between natural life and a true artificial life.
The first short film, called What on earth!, is built around the idea of an imaginary documentary created by Martian scientists about Earth and its inhabitants. The element of surprise consists in the fact that the Martians think of the cars as the legitimate inhabitants of Earth, while human beings are regarded as parasites infecting the Earth with colonies and nests, or “the cities”. The second short film, Rejected, is instead a collection of irreverent advertising spots by Don Hertzfeldt. The drawings are simple and stylized, while the situations and the dialogues at first glance seem absurd and out of the context. As the narration goes on the cartoons get crumpled and destroyed, until they are swallowed by a black hole in the end. The third short, Wild Life, has a gloomy atmosphere, which is emphasized by the particular choice of typical 30’s music. The story deals with a young Englishman from the city who dreams of becoming a cowboy and decides to move to Canada, only to see his dreams crumble. The fourth and last short film, Logorama, also Academy Award winner, is a disorienting story set in a world entirely composed of commercial logos, where a criminal version of Ronald McDonald clashes with Micheling men in the role of policemen.
Undoubtedly, each of these films contains a critic to modern society and its unjustified frenzy, and the animation, with its crazy hysteria, is able to show the human alienation deriving from the chaos of contemporary life. What emerges from these animations is the message that advertisement has neither a purpose nor a concrete shape, but it is instead an incomprehensible stream which contributes to define a critical vision of our world.
