Directed, Written and Animated by Chansoo Kim
Faculty Advisor: Christine Panushka, Vebeke Sorensen
Advisor: Igor Kovalyov
Editing Consultant: Anuj Majumdar
Music: Sujin Nam
Recording Engineer: Shawn Hinds
Sound Designer: Chansoo Kim
Foley & ADR Artists: Hsin-Ping Pan, Yorico Murakami
Sound Mixer: Stephanie Keane
Film Notes
Director Chansoo Kim describes his engimatic short Vaudeville as “a visual poem about despair, wandering, and the loss of cultural identity.” The film exhibits a deft and mature vision, all the more impressive when one realizes that the film was produced as a graduate thesis project at University of Southern California. There is no easy narrative in Vaudeville, perhaps because the subject matter of the short does not lend itself to simple-minded narrative solutions. Vaudeville is a musing about the difficult history of Kim’s birth country, South Korea, and the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula for much of the first half of the 20th century.
Kim’s inspiration for making the film came from family stories he had heard about the adversity and uncertainty endured by his grandparents’ generation. The title of the film is derived from the traveling entertainment shows which toured the Korean countryside during the 1930s, presenting cheap thrills such as popular music and trite comedy routines in an overwhelmingly bleak environment. “The characters in the film Vaudeville look like they’re acting in one of the ‘moving theater’ comedies; they’re confused and easily get into trouble,â€? Kim told The Park Record in an interview last year.
The sense of observation in Kim’s film is acute; each gesture animated with meaning. When a character runs into a wall, he rolls over in pain in a staggering and exquisitely realized manner. Kim credits his personal mentor on the project, independent filmmaker and Klasky-Csupo veteran director Igor Kovalyov, for helping him to understand characterization. “What he really taught me was that my characters needed individual mannerisms,” Kim says. “The small details like a character sneezing or sniffing are what helps to bring a character alive.”
The images from Vaudeville stay with you long after the film is over: the group of men walking through the portal, the girl on the swing, the floating husband-and-wife (note that the woman is Japanese, the man is Korean). Though Kim knows exactly what these scenes mean, he prefers not to discuss the richly layered symbolism of his film, instead allowing each individual viewer to glean their own personal meaning from the film. Kim’s sensitive pacing, eerie sound design and muted color palette all work towards establishing a mood that reflects the uncertainty of the era. —Amid Amidi
Selected Screenings and Festivals
Student Academy Awards 2005 West Coast Regional Finalist
The 1 Reel Film Festival (Seattle, Washington)
Ottawa International Animation Festival (Ottawa, Canada)
International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (Leipzig, Germany)
Sleepwalkers’ Student Film Festival (Tallinn, Estonia) SPECIAL MENTION
Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, Utah)
Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs Media Arts Festival (Tokyo, Japan) JURY RECOMMENDED WORK
Anima: Festival of Cartoon and Animated Film of Brussels (Brussels, Belgium)
The Emirates Film Competition (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
SXSW Film Festival (Austin, Texas)
Aspen Shortsfest (Aspen, Colorado)
Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (Seoul, Korea)
World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb (Zagreb, Croatia)
Anima Mundi (Rio de Janeiro/Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Hiroshima International Animation Festival (Hiroshima, Japan)
Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria)
Holland Animation Film Festival (Utrecht, Holland)
HDFest (Los Angeles, California)
About the Director: Chansoo Kim
Growing up in South Korea, Chansoo Kim was an avid animation fan, watching every animated series available on TV. He later learned about the international and independent animation scenes while studying graphic design in college, and discovered a renewed interest in the medium. After working as a graphic designer in Seoul, South Korea for several years, he decided to pursue his childhood passion.
Kim studied animation in the University of Southern California, where he produced several short animated films using various techniques. His films, Woman in the Attic and Vaudeville gained critical acclaim through the festival circuit. He has worked at ILM and currently works at Rhythm & Hues Studios.
