Dec 18, 2023

2024 Oscar Nominee for Best Short Film: "Arrest In Flight," directed by Adrian Fleury

Welcome to Cartoon Brew's spotlight series highlighting animated short films that have qualified for the 2024 Academy Awards. There are several ways for a film to qualify for an award. In this edition, we will focus on films that have won an Oscar-eligible award at a festival that is eligible for the Academy Awards.

Today's short film, "Arrested in Flight," directed by Adrian Fleury, won the Chris Frain Award for Best Animated Short Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and qualified for an Academy Award.

This non-narrative film is a joy to watch. Loaded with color and movement, it is familiar and satisfying, but always several degrees out of the ordinary, especially when combined with its eerie soundtrack.

Cartoon Brew: Your film is one of the few non-narrative films eligible for this year's awards. And how did the results compare to your expectations?

Adrian Fleury: The idea was to follow the rules of the physical situation in front of the camera and create movement through very simple methods and objects that did not follow a script on paper. I tried to do what seemed most obvious instead of creating an image that was needed or required. The result was better and much different than I had planned, but it is important to me to surprise myself with every piece.

What attracted you to this story and concept and what made you decide to direct this film? It looks fascinating, like an actual scientific laboratory facility, but we don't know what the research is about. The goal was to keep the mystery alive by making most of it unknowable.

What did you learn about the production aspect, the filmmaking aspect, the creative aspect, or the subject matter through the experience of making this film? Because if you ask 10 people for their opinion, you will usually get 10 different answers. But mainly because the people who give you advice have never tried to make your film.

I was going to do it on actual locations because all the animation is life-size. Actual locations turned out to be impractical, so we switched to a studio, where we had more options. So color was needed to fill the void. Another reason for the colorful style is that most science fiction films try to create a heavy monochrome world. But I like saturated colors