In Focus - Fast and furious animation with Runaway

A train might be the easiest way to talk about class, which explains why it’s often used as a visual metaphor for the idea so often. The cars are separated by class, after all, depending on what level of ticket the passenger decides to purchase, so it’s an easy parallel to draw. Runaway (dir. Cordell Barker) is such a metaphor, using the train to tell a story of class divisions dooming everyone.

The plot is simple, the engineer of a train goes off to try to seduce a young woman who wanders into the train engine in search of her little black dog. This leaves the train with nobody in charge, which eventually leads to utter chaos. At one point, as the train attempts to climb a hill, the folks in the first class cabin buy everything off of the people in the second class cabin to use for fuel, until they are standing naked on a bare platform. It is not exactly a subtle metaphor for the state of the economy at this point, but then you’ve got the inherent comedy of a bunch of confused naked people, a classic visual joke.

It’s politically charged, but it’s not a screed. The film has visual gags in every frame, a rousing jazz score by Benoit Charest, a delightfully chaotic design and endless invention. It’s unpredictable, funny and endlessly rewatchable. It may be a film born of frustration, but it’s a joy to behold, an example of how using comedy and art makes even the most serious point easier to digest.

While he has only directed four shorts, all for the National Film Board, Barker has long been one of Canada’s most acclaimed animators - his first two films, The Cat Came Back and Strange Invaders both receiving Academy Award nominations - and Runaway is a good introduction to his work.

The pacing is perfect, contrasting the chaos of the train with the relative calm inside the first class cabin - while also using the inherent absurdity of playing snooker on a train as another visual joke - and he has a keen sense of how to continue escalating situations that would only work in animation. Landscapes get increasingly abstract - Barker has a fondness for conical mountains - and frames flash by at a rate that can barely be read by the human eye. Even then you get a joke, tossing a baby into peril in a moment that’s blink-and-you-miss-it quick. But it’s not wall-to-wall chaos, which is important, because it allows the audience a break from processing the sheer amount of information on screen.

It also ends with a shot that recalls some of the Yorkton Film Festival’s posters from the 1970s and 80s, featuring a cow and a vibrant sunset. It also happened to win the award for Best Animation at the 2010 festival.