The short film “Night Bus” uses cutout animation and hand-drawn characters to capture the illustrious beauty—and the inherent risk—of a moonlit drive.
The film’s hand-drawn characters and backdrop prove to be the perfect format for capturing the illustrious beauty, and the inherent exhilaration and risk, of a moonlit drive.
For the filmmaker Joe Hsieh, the idea for his animated short “Night Bus” came suddenly, vividly. He’d been travelling alone through Taiwan, along the coastline, past palm trees dotting structured reefs, waves audibly crashing and splashing and receiving the glow of the moon. And, in the sublimity of the moment, Hsieh could see it—the plot, the characters, the environment.
“I always wanted to do some story like this,” Hsieh told me, of helming a movie in the suspense genre. But to resign “Night Bus” to a singular category is an oversimplification, although the film is certainly suspenseful and, yes, very, very funny. And yet it could just as easily be deemed a massacre melodrama, or a slasher soap opera, or even a fender mind-bender—a marriage of the giddy and gory extravagances of George A.
It starts innocuously enough: a baby monkey nuzzles up to its mother as they share a pomegranate beneath a full moon; a couple embraces, their intimacy visible solely in shadow projected onto a nondescript wall; two miners wait idly outside, one smoking, one kicking his feet about, bored; a suited man boldly kneels on all fours in a dirty bathroom, peeking underneath the door of a stall; and a silver-haired sophisticate literally clutches her pearls as a neat man in shades and a plain button-up...
The body horror, as base yet delectable as it is in “Night Bus,” is not the heart of the film. Rather, “the black humor and the over-the-top violence can be seen as a tool,” Hsieh said, “to heighten the suspense.” And the spectacle pushing the suspense works because the emotional stakes are towering in ways that are obvious from the outset, and in ways that are revealed through the movie’s ever-harrowing circumstances.
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