Jim Trainor's THE BATS

Jim Trainor is a fine artist, teacher and animator who makes charmingly ugly little short films that are surreal while also being educational while also being weirdly personal. In The Bats, he takes us deep inside a bat cave, where a chatty bat explains the ways of bat life. We learn about bat mating, bat cannibalism, the bat God, and many other bat things. These creatures of the night are easy to relate to in some ways, profoundly alien in others. Trainor doesn't sentimentalize his animal characters, he simply gives them voice and allows us to draw our own conclusions.

This short features some really appalling business involving bat poo and some NSFW bat sex, but if a bat was going to tell you about his life, I bet it'd sound a lot like this. (The DVD at left, Cartune Exprez 2008, features the work of Trainor and other contemporary experimental animators.)

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