'Sierra' (2022) by Sander Joon: Film Review
It’s not unusual that a young kid would prefer to engage in activities like frolicking on the family home's tire swing and croaking merrily along with frogs in the yard than be pushed headfirst into a world of competitive sportsmanship. With ‘Sierra’ (production: AAA Creative) Estonian animation director Sander Joon brings us into his semi-autobiographical world that starts with this premise and continues with the boy’s father shoving him into none other than the world of race car driving, with the young kid literally at the wheel. This personal and playful short was shortlisted for the Oscars in 2023 in the Animated Short Film category after picking up a slew of awards on the festival circuit including prizes at Tallinn Black Nights, Animateka, San Francisco International Film Festival, AFI Fest, and Palm Springs International ShortFest.
The boy’s persistent, mustachioed father forces his dreams and a motorsports helmet on his young child, tossing him headfirst into a 1-v-1 race car rally of Mario Kart-physics proportions. With the child driving, the vehicles jump about on the track so quickly that the father’s perfectly manicured facial hair springs right off of his face. Joon makes full use of his world’s gravity-defying physics, where spectators roll around like car tires or perch in a tree like a flock of birds, combined with laugh-out-loud absurdist humor to maintain a light-hearted feel despite its darker, sadder message.
The filmmaker also draws from a 1980 black-and-white, stop-motion 16mm race car animation created by his father, Heikki Joon, which the filmmaker inventively embeds into the film and mirrors through the story’s — and race car’s — twists and turns. In doing so, he furthers this meta-narrative that engages with the well-intentioned nature of dreams pushed onto the next generations — and living vicariously through one’s children — which ultimately is bound to have adverse effects.
The animator nails a distinct and memorable style that remains joyful on the eye through the end, contrasting more detailed characters with gently textured pastel-colored backgrounds and environments. The adorable, silly, and brightly colored green frogs introduced at the start of the film — representing the son’s desire to play and simply exist as a child — is one of the most vividly hued aspects of the film, while the father’s fixation, his precious car, is depicted in a contrasting bright red.
Joon uses a 3D animation technique made to resemble paper cutouts, at times also referencing Henri Matisse’s famous painting, ‘La Danse’, as well as the artist's own massive cutout works. This allows him to creatively utilize the geometries of the characters and objects in tandem, notably during the film’s key moment at its halfway point. One of his unique touches is also the addition of faux-flickering that emulates the feel of analog film grain, which remains a subliminal but highly effective visual technique.
As a film with vocalizations but no dialogue, Joon uses expansive sound design (with sound credited to Matis Rei) to create this unified journey, weaving together sounds of revving automobile engines with the white noise buzz of television and the gurgling of frogs, all of which bear remarkable similarities. A bouncy but minimalist electronic-forward score by Misha Panfilov further keeps pace with the action without ever serving as sonic narration. By the film's end, it’s clear that ‘Sierra’ does what most excellent narrative animation tends to accomplish: a creative unification of form and content, each feeding symbiotically into the other all the way through the film's symbolic gut-punch of a finale.
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