Pica Towers – Wylie

This was an interesting little set of videos. The entire Pica Towers project just reeks of Tim Burton in the best possible way. The animation style, narrative tone, and character types all have that “dark, mysterious” aura about them.

I have always been a fan of “pseudo-silent” films; films or short stories where there is no dialogue between charaters. Instead, all of the plot progression takes place through the characters actions. For short films, specifically for a series like the Pica Tower shorts, the silence works well. The overall tone of the stories are dark and eerie, so the absence of dialogue really adds a nice sense of foreboding, despite the “cartoonish” characters.

The filmmaking techniques were also solid in these three shorts. The animation style was attractive to look at. There was great attention to detail with multiple camera angles present. This gave everything a very cinema feel, despite everything being an animation.

Despite the sound technical quality of these shorts, I felt that the character development is when things fell apart. I thought the trilogy was setting up for some big reveal or plot twist at the end, but no: we are lead to believe that the “mysterious killer” is just a hillbilly TV with a gun who kills for no reason. He has no motivation; I feel that the ending was wasted and the action built up to nothing special. It also seems kind of off that we are lead to believe that this goofy looking character with a gun is the same one who brutally murdered two people prior in extremely violent fashion.

All in all, I enjoyed the Pica Tower trilogy. The sound technical principles and visual aesthetics were a nice touch, but I was left disappointed by the characters.