OIAF 2022: Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Ottawa International Animation Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) is a festival that is hosted in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. The yearly festival is the oldest and largest animation festival in North America. It features, in addition to feature films, documentary works, short films, conferences, VR exhibits, and more multimedia animation festivities. 

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish is a film by independent filmmaker Lei Lei, director of many animated shorts as well as live action work mostly in the documentary field. His latest, Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish, is a uniquely told documentary in the form of an animated feature. Lei employs a unique storytelling method here to tell his family’s story, placed against the backdrop of an ever-changing Chinese society in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. This made for a very personal tale for Lei, and the animation style employed played right into that.

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish is essentially one big scrapbook. Using claymation, Lei constructed little clay figures and faces that he put over real pictures of his family members in what looked and felt like a cinematic scrapbook. Set in the Ningdu region of China, the film seeks to tell the story of Lei’s parents and grandparents, who lived there during the cultural revolution, which greatly changed life in Ningdu and China at the time. Much of the film is narrated by Lei’s family members who go through the scrapbook, recounting memories and stories when they encounter a new photo. The clay art is used to represent a new character, or family member encountered throughout the film, ending with a huge group of clay-mated figures on screen.

Lei’s film is very personal, and is clearly an important story for him to tell not only as an artist but as a human being. The uncompromising nature of this work can make the film feel at times somewhat distant. It is very much a film for Lei, and of course for his family. The film does not try to delve deep into the struggles of other families in China at the time, and Lei is not interested in a study of the era. Using the clay faces to represent the different family members being discussed in the film helps to immerse the audience in the narrative, and in the family story as well.  also takes its time in telling its story. Lei has no urgency here, and while the film is relatively short, sitting at just around 100 minutes, it often moves at an incredibly slow pace. This is a pace that is slow enough to sometimes take audiences out of the film. 

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish is quiet, subtle, and seeks to tell a specific story. Lei is an uncompromising filmmaker, and the animation work on display here is undoubtedly very impressive. His idea to use multimedia storytelling to bring a scrapbook to life on the big screen is without question innovative. The film moves just too slow at times for the viewer to stay hooked.

*still courtesy of IFFR*

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Brennan Dubé

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