Jan 28, 2018

Jeron Braxton's “Glucose” Wins Top Award for Animation at Sundance

“Glucose,” an independent short film by 23-year-old American filmmaker Jeron Braxton, won the Jury Prize for Best Animated Short at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

This is the official description of the short by the Sundance program: “Sugar was the driving force behind the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to America. Glucose is sweet, marketable, and easy to consume, but its superficial gratification thinly veils the pain of many disenfranchised people.

Cartoon Brew offered the online premiere of “Glucose” through our CB Fest event last July. The short can be viewed in its entirety below:

“The Internet was a huge inspiration for the film and created the structural framework for the film,” Braxton told Cartoon Brew. 'You see puppies, you see dance videos, you see police killing innocent men on the street.'

While the fragmented narrative of this short film may indeed seem as disorienting as the experience of spending a few hours online, Braxton ties it all together with a compulsively watchable CG style and an underlying message that resonates especially for those living in the United States.

Kudos to the Sundance Short Films jury for selecting Braxton's film. That jury consisted of Shirley Munson, lead vocalist of Garbage, cartoonist Chris Ware, and filmmaker/TV director Sherien Davis (“Amreeka,” “The L Word,” “Empire”).

Presenting the award, Ware issued the following jury statement:

“The film traces the hauntingly complex threads of American history through a hauntingly fresh language of image, avatar and sound. As a cartoonist myself, I know how much thought and effort it takes to make a film as dense, trippy, and serious as this one. [But with Jeron Braxton and “Glucose,” Sundance could not have chosen a more exciting and fresh voice on the American animation scene.

To learn more about “Glucose,” see our visual essay with comments from the director.