Sep 7, 2016

Ottawa Animation Festival 40th Anniversary Screening: "Carrot Night

The Ottawa International Animation Festival, North America's largest and most important animation event, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

To celebrate, the festival has commissioned international animation historians, programmers, and critics to write an essay about each of the grand prize winning films. In partnership with the festival, Cartoon Brew will present one essay each week leading up to the festival, September 21-25, 2016. We have already featured essays on The Man Who Planted Trees, Hen, His Wife, and Two Sisters. Today we present the 1998 award-winning film, "The Night of the Carrots," directed by Preet Perun.

For information on how to participate in this month's Ottawa, visit animationfestival.ca.

I love power outages; in August 2003, Ottawa (and the rest of Canada and the eastern US) had one of considerable magnitude.

No internet. No TV. Minimal radio. No video games. Children were free to play in the streets. Neighbors sat in lawn chairs out front, talking, drinking, eating with each other. Life slowed down and became quiet.

The fact that it was summer helped, and even when we had a storm in the winter of 1998 that cut the power, a certain peace of mind came over us. As the Manchester wit said, it was "louder than a bomb". I crave more power outages, and given our drunken thirst for energy, I suspect that sooner or later we will endure more of them.

Indeed... We can choose to have our own power outages, but let's face it... We are vulnerable... We are all connected to our devices, we are all junkies. Even though Facebook does little to nothing in my life when I am calm, cool, and objective, I check it constantly... Almost mechanically... Just to see if someone "likes" what I said! to see if they said it... Not even that... I don't even know why I check in... Maybe to avoid a real connection... (I know this isn't the best example, because if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have caught the cancer in my balls early)... I often want to cancel my account, but I always find myself stuck on it... Maybe this fear is that I might miss something or be forgotten. For foolishly, we will all be forgotten someday.

I paused to check Facebook.

And of course, I haven't missed anything. Certainly Facebook gives us the opportunity to make contact with international friends and family living in other cities and countries... But it's a rather scant contact... And hell... Long distance calls are easy and free these days... Still, step away from Facebook and see how quiet it gets... It's almost as if they've gone into exile... You'll notice that no one texts or calls these days... But I've seen my productivity decline since the rise of the internet, especially FB... from 2003-2010 I wrote a mountain of books... Nothing since then. Sure... Part of that is due to changes in my personal life, but part of it is due to procrastination on the Internet.

Remember the days of reading magazines in the bathroom

Meanwhile, time is ticking away. Life is getting shorter, and as I approach 50, I wonder where the hell my life has gone. Well... I'm exaggerating a bit because I'm feeling a bit burnt out, it's hot outside, and I think too much. Honestly... I travel a lot and do a lot of outdoor activities, but I bet life would taste a lot better if I got rid of this FB... .fb is like life's fucking tv dinner. Life, or reality, or direct contact: ...... It's like a multi-course meal, carefully and lovingly prepared.

Which brings us finally to Priit Perun's hilarious absurdist film "Night of the Carrots," where the Y2K panic began when a computer programmer used only the last two numbers to identify the years. In other words, as the clock strikes midnight to usher in the year 2000, the computers get confused (maybe we've all been on the TARDIS back to 1900, who knows? Planes fall from the sky, the financial system collapses, dogs bark, babies scream, men cry, windows break. It's truly the apocalypse.

Sadly, none of that happened, but apparently some slot machines in Delaware stopped working.

Well, where are we...

Ah, yes, "Carrot Night." [This film can be read in many ways. It could be a comment on the easy nature of celebrity worship (Diego Maradona, Michael Jackson, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, and Steffi Graf are all mentioned in the film), or it could be a cautionary tale against the false allure of free market economics and the European Union (the Pern's early masterpiece Hotel E, made as the Soviet Union was collapsing, suggested that life might be different, but not necessarily better, in capitalist countries). Estonia had only been independent for a few years and there was much debate as to whether joining the E.U. was in the country's best interest (after much discussion, it finally joined in 2004).

All of these interpretations are valid, and there must be others, but I have always seen "Carrot Night" as a comradely spirit that yearns for the self-destruction of computers and with it the self-destruction of the Internet and all the other damn things connected to us like shitty drip bags I see it as.

At the core of "Night of the Carrots" is a sanatorium-like place called "PGI." Large numbers of people are looking for a chance to enter the sanatorium. However, it is not clear why they want to enter there. The narrator says, "Their real purpose was to be candidates.

In each room of the PGI, we meet strange characters (such as Michael the Zebra, a thin, frail white creature clearly modeled after Michael Jackson and not unlike a zebra) who just want to get away. Each of the inhabitants has a personal dream that they soon realize cannot be realized because they are literally tethered to their rooms.

But there is hope.

Once a year, during a random night, all the rabbits (who control the world through computers) inexplicably transform into carrots and release the PGI residents.

Indeed, when read in the context of the Y2K panic, "Night of the Carrots" seems to celebrate the possibility of temporary release from the computer system. But there is more to it than that. Perun also makes prescient comments about the dangers of technology, the Internet, and social media saturating our existence. While it lures you in with promises of instant virtual interaction and experiences, it ultimately isolates, makes you yearn for, and disconnects you...

... That's how it feels.