Frank Film
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Frank Film
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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Frank Film is a 1973 American animated short film by Frank Mouris. The film won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1996.
Why It Rocks
- Frank Mouris and his wife Caroline Ahlfors Mouris used an animation stand to create Frank Film, a collage work that took three years to assemble. They researched, cut out, and glued onto acetate cells 11,592 images—photographs, illustrations, and other graphic work—arranging them in geometric patterns that cascade up, down, and across the frame, timed to both an internal rhyme scheme (pies beget desserts, televisions beget other appliances) and to the soundtrack.
- Composed of two separate narrations overlaid on each other, the soundtrack itself is a form of collage, mixed by Tony Schwartz so that one channel generally predominates over the other, but at times too dense to fully comprehend. One voice-over is a dry, self-deprecating autobiography of Frank Mouris, delivered by Mouris himself. The other, also voiced by Mouris, is a free-form, stream-of-consciousness monologue that plays off images on the screen as well as details of Mouris’s life. (A lot of the words in this track start with F.)
- The short film offers a dizzying and ultimately depressing snapshot of consumer goods in the second half of the twentieth century. It may not explicitly criticize the consequences of capitalism, but the material on display can’t help but evoke themes of greed and gluttony. While the film charts the gradual maturation of Mouris, who moves from narcissism to an interest in sexuality to attempts at socialization, the underlying mood is one of insecurity. His autobiography isn’t significant to stand by itself, and is periodically drowned out by irrelevant data. Similarly, one image isn’t interesting or worthwhile enough to hold the screen, it has to be duplicated, mirrored, contrasted with others.
- Mouris insists that he had no ulterior motive in mind when creating the film. Instead, he saw the film as the 1970s equivalent of a calling card movie—a work designed to attract further work. In an interview with Heather Kenyon, he said, “Caroline and I did Frank Film just to do that one personal film that you do to get the artistic inclinations out of your system before going commercial. Then we planned to join the industry, as you call it, armed with her MBA and my MFA.” That may explain Mouris’s comical insistence on self-identification throughout the film, although he wryly notes that his tactic backfired.
The Only Bad Quality
- The overlapping dialogue from both of the narration track can definitely be overwhelming for some people, and it may be difficult for some to be able to keep track of both of them.