Tribeca 2023 Review: Corvine Is a Playful Animated Short in Need of Another Editing Pass

One thing I appreciate about the privilege of attending festivals is the shorts, especially animated ones. It seems as though the animated shorts tend to be the best in any festival's lineup, and I'm usually not proven wrong.

Until now.

Corvine is an animated short directed, produced, written, animated, and edited by Sean McCarron, with the other main credits being his brother, Robert, who voices the main character and composer, Suad Bushnaq. The animated short depicts the life of an unnamed boy who experiences problems fitting in at his school due to his obsession with crows.

So, what went wrong? For starters, Bushnaq's violin-driven score can sometimes become overbearing due to Ryan Sanchez's mixing of the score. It's way too loud in the sound mixing, and I would love to see that improved in the final release.

Something that unfortunately can not be improved upon is the tonal whiplash I felt from the short's narrative. It's one thing to depict the highs and lows of life, but it's an entirely different thing to go from a boy happily following crows around a field to that same boy being miserable that borders on depression.

Additionally, beyond the overall highs and lows that McCarron presents to the viewer, I found the short's overall narrative challenging to follow, even its relatively short 10-minute runtime. Maybe that could be fixed with a quick edit or the addition of new scenes that make the story a bit clearer to the viewer, but the less is more approach of the short may make a re-edit difficult.

All of this said it's not all bad. The animation is quite charming, with a playful feel to it that feels reminiscent of early Walt Disney Animation Studios like The Fox and the Hound, or to be more accurate to McCarron's experience at Cartoon Saloon, Song of the Sea.

My favorite part of McCarron Production's animation is that it reproduces that playful feel of animation that's relatively vanished from the industry. One animation trick I loved being deployed in Corvine that I may or may not be right about is animating on twos (animating only 12 frames instead of 24) to evoke the classic feel often associated with 2D animation.

Unfortunately, this is not enough to recommend Corvine to others. The score is way too loud, and the tone is all over the place. However, if those two things could be fixed in a re-edit, maybe I could recommend it then.

★★

Corvine had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Festival.

Until next time!