Victoria Vincent's Floatland (2018)

NOTE: This Monday short was originally posted on February 18, 2019. We are re-uploading Peter Hemminger's original Monday Shorts until further notice.

With their simple, stylized characters, canted camera angles and distinctive colour palettes, Victoria Vincent's films all share an instant appeal. For all her visual flair, though, her greatest asset as a filmmaker is probably her ability to condense a complex narrative to a few key moments. Shorts like Cat City and Mask Dog (and other less animal-centric films, too) use that ability to quickly escalate their stories into the absurd, ramping up the consequences before you can even catch your breath. But it's even more impressive when she uses those same skills to build a more complex mood.

Floatland could have been just another short about how addictive the online world can be. Its main character is hooked on the easy emotional satisfaction of levelling up in an artificial world, to the detriment of her day-to-day life. But Vincent doesn't nag. She builds the rhythm of the game, its staccato beats echoing the quick hits of serotonin online games dole out. You see how engrossing it can be, and how worrying, too—in a cartoon world, you never quite know what the consequences might be. The range of moods it runs through in just over two-and-a-half minutes is astounding. The fact she can do it in such an intuitively appealing way is why she's an artist you absolutely should be following.