I’ve been fighting the urge to say, “what’s with all the quotation marks, Joe?” …I lost.
I don’t know what you think about crabs. Not crabs the parasitic insect species and notorious groin infestation. No, crabs the decapod crustaceans of the infraorder Brachyura. Yeah those! Real crabs are creepy, they scuttle sideways and have too many legs. Luckily cartoon crabs are cute. This one is anyway. “Jack” shows a lot of character as he takes us through this unexpected sub-aquatic retelling of children’s classic Jack and The Beanstalk. “Jack” turns out to be a bit of a bad-ass, pirate-botherer and crusading crustacean for consumer rights. Although for some reason he sounds like Mickey mouse.
The film was produced in 24 hours by Joseph Daniels and Jedidiah Mitchell and their crack team of volunteer animators. If this is all too much for you, go check out Unnecessary Quotes, which will leave you with a nice, comforting feeling of smugness.
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Woo! Thanks for posting this. Great to be part of such a neat lineup.
And for reference, the unnecessary “quotes” are there because the crab was neither named Jack nor did he actually climb any beanstalks. So the title is actually something of a misnomer, I guess…
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The title works! It’s part of the experience I think. Everyone knows the plot but the pleasure is in seeing how it’s been interpreted.
You put us all to shame with your 24 hour effort. Well done!
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Joe Daniels and I did several of these “24 hour challenges” while we were at RIT learning animation. They were really some of the most fun we had making films, partly because they were just so spontaneous.
The reason we called them “challenges” instead of just projects or shorts was to highlight their nature: we came into hour 0 of these films with *nothing* but a single piece of inspiration. Once it was a piece of music, one time we used an image to get people thinking; on “Jack” and the “Beanstalk” all we gave our volunteer story team was the design term “silhouette” and the characters, art direction, and story all grew organically out of that core concept.
It’s incredible to see what students can do when they don’t know they can’t do it; I think there should be more “challenges” like these in film schools. Really, everyone should get to experience the pleasure of sitting in an unlit, abandoned lecture hall at 5 in the morning making Mickey Mouse voices into a laptop microphone.
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