This review was originally published on September 8, 2012…
Hacker Terrence (Ulric Dihle) is helping Kali (Tricia Helfer) find out the whereabouts of her cohort Benjamin. Imprisoned in a lab of some sort, Benjamin’s health is failing as he endures tests of his supernatural mental powers, which are capable of creating a protective force field even as a soldier fires his gun at point blank range. The testing makes it very clear that Benjamin is immensely powerful, and the testers probably don’t have the most noble of intentions for those abilities.
Cole Drumb and Jennifer Wai-Yin Luk’s short animated film PostHuman reminded me of the early Æon Flux short cartoons that used to show as part of MTV’s Liquid Television. They were hyper-kinetic segment blasts of a larger narrative that the audience never got, and they left an impression that far exceeded the need to understand what just happened. Like Æon Flux, I don’t know what everything I saw in PostHuman is supposed to mean, but I’ll watch it again, and I want to see even more.
There is a slight visual dissonance that occurs between the very clean and smooth digital backgrounds and landscape shots as compared to the more vibrant and gritty animation of the characters in some shots, though. The difference is that feeling of the backgrounds as something you could see being smoothly rendered in a 3D program of some sort, while the rest of the animation is more comfortably traditional; where the two come together often just points out the disparity of the techniques.
Beyond that slight disconnect, however, I found PostHuman to be pretty spectacular, with a wonderfully appropriate electro-music score. I watched it multiple times, and I still want more from the PostHuman world. Whether it be more shorts or a feature film, they’ve got my attention.
This film was submitted for review through our Submission for Review system. If you have a film you’d like us to see, and we aren’t already looking into it on our own, you too can utilize this service.
