Four Shorts By Spike Jonze

The trailer for Spike Jonze's new film "Her" was recently released, his first feature since "Where the Wild Things Are" in 2009. However, Jonze has been busy during the break, directing four different shorts that can be found online without much effort, and about the same number of music videos. I want to focus on the shorts, however, as shorts are too often unfairly overlooked and unloved entries in a director's filmography. Many consider them lesser works, or simply stepping stones to full features, and Jonze is a fairly rare director who has continued to produce short films after helming many successful features. So let's take a look at Spike Jonze's recent shorts, one by one, in chronological order:

"We Were Once a Fairytale" (2009) - Made before "Where the Wild Things Are," though its official release was delayed until after "Wild Things" premiered. Discussions for Jonze to direct the music video for Kanye West's "See You in My Nightmares" evolved into this eleven-minute short film. See Kanye as you've never seen him before, playing himself as a drunken lout in a nightclub, who is not having one of the better nights of his life. He repels women, makes a nuisance of himself, instigates a fight, and finally has to face the consequences - a bizarre finale involving puppets, rose petals, and multiple suicides. This is more of an oddball experimental piece than anything else, with a few bits of interesting imagery, but not much else to recommend it.

"I'm Here" (2010) - Wikipedia tells me this thirty-minute short was funded by and is a promotion for Absolut Vodka, which I didn't pick up on at all. Instead, it feels like a much more personal piece, a gentle romance between two robots who live in a version of Los Angeles where robots and human coexist side by side. Lonely robot Sheldon (Andrew Garfield), our protagonist, has a beige, blocky computer tower of a head, with expressive eyes and mouth rendered with the help of CGI animation. The robots have mechanical bodies, but dress in normal clothes, hold normal jobs, and seem to live and behave and feel the full gamut of emotions in the same way that humans do. The female robots, with oval heads and slimmer limbs, even have hair. Sheldon meets and falls in love with a dreamy robot artist named Francesca (Sienna Guillory), and their relationship proceeds much in the same way that human relationships do. However, there are certain advantages to being a robot in love, as Sheldon discovers when unexpected tragedy strikes. It's the worldbuilding here that is the most impressive, with its use of deliberately dated-looking materials to build the robots, and the whimsy of the dialogue and the interactions. It's all a little on the precious side, and it came to no surprise to me what the main inspiration for the film turned out to be, but I liked this one. It's exactly the kind of sentimental, humane approach that I'd expect Jonze to take to this kind of material, and provides the best hints of what "Her" is probably going to look like.

"Scenes From the Suburbs" (2011) - Jonze's collaboration with the band Arcade Fire, for their recent album "The Suburbs." There's very little fantasy or whimsy here, in a thirty-minute short about a group of teenagers living in a small town. We primarily follow two boys, Kyle (Sam Dillon) and his best friend Winter (Paul Pluymen), over the course of an eventful summer. Initially their lives seem simple and untroubled, but the growing presence of armed and hooded members of a sinister militia force in their town suggests something is seriously amiss. The short is an allegory for the loss of innocence, and how we lose the ones we love, built from nostalgic memories of adolescence, and real-world grown-up fears of oppression and violence. This is my favorite of the four shorts for its ability to evoke very painful emotions. Jonze shows us only a few pieces of the characters' lives, but it's enough to understand how the distances form and the alienation sets in between the two boys. Some of the most important scenes are only seen in quickly-cut, fragmentary glimpses, interspersed throughout the short. A six-minute music video version of the short was also produced, containing some different material, so the two versions of "Suburbs" complement each other. Finally, take note that Arcade Fire will be scoring "Her" for Jonze.

"Mourir Auprès De Toi (To Die By Your Side)" (2011) - A quick six-minute animated love story, between characters from the covers of colorful tomes in a live action bookstore. Our hero is a felt skeleton who leaves the cover of "Macbeth" to woo the fair damsel who graces the cover of "Dracula." Alas, he is intercepted on his journey by a tragic encounter with the whale from "Moby Dick." The concept is straight out of the old Warner Bros shorts, like "Have You Got Any Castles?" except far more macabre, and in the closing moments, far more raunchy. The execution is a lot of fun, though, and this is another great example of Jonze mixing mediums and putting his own mark on an old, established, formula.
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