Art Fair's Surprise Gem Wasn't Even For Sale— It's A Charming Animated Short

(SPOT.ph) There was an entire room of Kidlat Tahimik portraits; a whole wooden kapilya with an SFX of a haunting moan; and a living, breathing human lady hugging her laptop while they’re both encased in a transparent vitrine for eight exhibition hours a day. But the surprise gem of this year’s Art Fair Philippines might just as well be a low-key animated short film entitled The Keeper, a work by the visual artist TRNZ and Fleet Studios. Quiet, earnest, and moving—and more importantly, visitors didn't need to shell out a single cent to take the experience and the feels home. Well, maybe just the P750 Art Fair entrance fee.

Done in TRNZ’s familiar aesthetic of children engaging in everyday chores against a melancholic setting, the beautifully scored eight-minuter is a surprisingly poignant story of a young caretaker in charge of a house filled with trophies. As he goes about his day taking note of their upkeep, a bird makes his way inside the house and threatens its strict sense of order. How the animal does that, you’ll need to stay tuned for when and where TRNZ will show the film again as Art Fair ended Sunday night.

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“I’ve always wanted to do something beyond painting and sculpture,” says TRNZ, or Terence Eduarte, “and doing animation has always been a dream.” The high cost of doing animation, however, has long kept that dream at bay, until the artist thought of going the crowdfunding way— asking his patrons/collectors to, well, help him make an animated film. He then developed the story with his friend and former fellow art director at TBWA, Nolan Fabular, whose Fleet Studios, a new animation outfit, took on The Keeper as its inaugural project.

Fabular wants to develop original Filipino content, and maybe even help evolve a Filipino style of animation by tapping on inherently homegrown touchstones. In The Keeper, these are 1) the walis tambo that the keeper arms himself with before climbing the topmost shelf in search of the winged intruder, and 2) an old San Miguel cold storage from the 1960s that TRNZ discovered served as the inspiration for the house. “Those details make it Pinoy and contemporary,” says Fabular.

TRNZ and Fleet Studios worked on the short film and its trailer for a year and a half, and reworked their storyboard twice, all in the name of composing nicer frames. (They’re former art directors, they can’t help it.) It got good feedback from Art Fair audiences, even as TRNZ thinks it initially felt the fair was not exactly the best venue for it. Well, it turns out it was a fitting venue. The film says something important about the value we bestow on accolades and things, and questions what really matters most in the end. A perfect message, come to think of it, in the context of the country’s biggest art marketplace.

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