Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Bingo" is an award-winning Canadian 5-minute short film from almost 20 years ago and this is based on Greg Kotis' play and the director is Chris Landreth. He made this film before his Oscar win for "Ryan", but was also an Academy Award nominee for another work at this point. Many people find clowns scary and I cannot say I am a great fan either and this film completely focuses on how clowns are scary and not funny. We see a seemingly normal man, who sits in a circus and all kinds of circus creatures (including an Abby Sciuto look-alike) turn him in a weird brain-washing manner into some kind of character who loses his mind and becomes the clown they want him to becomes. I thought the animation is good and the story succeeds through its strangeness and awkwardness. Landreth was in his mid-30s when he made this little animated movie and it's a success. I recommend checking it out and I actually like it more than "Ryan".

Prozzy "Bingo" is the latest entry in the arena of increasingly complex and lifelike computer-generated animations. Chris Landreth sought a subject for a short that would aid in the development of Maya, an animation software package by Alias/Wavefront. He found inspiration in the Chicago-based theater group "The Neo-Futurists" who for years have performed an ever-changing series of 30 plays in 60 minutes called "Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind." Greg Kotis's play "Disregard This Play," in which a man is psychologically brutalized into believing he is a clown named Bingo, became the basis for Landreth's animation.Bingo expands on the original short skit (a filmed portion of which we see at the beginning) by allowing the innate surrealism of the psychological battering to take on realistic imagery. The bizarre nature of the admittedly thin plot will not appeal to everyone. Several people I know simply raised their eyebrows and looked blankly at me when I asked them how they liked it. But all were impressed by the sheer technical prowess of the animation. Facial gestures, human musculature, lighting and shadows, smoke and haze effects are all astoundingly realistic. And Bingo shows why computer animators strive to create incredibly realistic human characters; not to become replacements for human actors, but to give us believable animated characters that can transform into these strange and surrealistic visions.