Skip to content
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Derek
    • Gary
    • Halley/Celeste
    • Paul
    • Ricky
    • Vik
  • Concerts
  • Reviews
    • Albums
    • Venue
    • Movies
    • Year End Reviews
  • Festivals
    • Canadian Music Week
    • Hot Docs
    • North By Northeast
    • Planet in Focus
    • Primavera
    • South By Southwest
  • Contact Us
Menu
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Derek
    • Gary
    • Halley/Celeste
    • Paul
    • Ricky
    • Vik
  • Concerts
  • Reviews
    • Albums
    • Venue
    • Movies
    • Year End Reviews
  • Festivals
    • Canadian Music Week
    • Hot Docs
    • North By Northeast
    • Planet in Focus
    • Primavera
    • South By Southwest
  • Contact Us

Locked-down SXSW Review: Homecoming -The Journey of Cardboard (Yuko Shiomaki/Anna Thorson Mayer)

Posted on
16 Apr 2020
by
Gary

Clipboard01

With the cancellation of this year’s SXSW, many of the films scheduled to screen there were suddenly left without a platform. In lieu of a proper screening, several of the short films officially selected for the 2020 SXSW Episodic Pilot Competition have been made available to screen via Vimeo. Below we review one of those films, Homecoming – The Journey of Cardboard.

Unlike the Mona Lisa or those fucking shiny balloon dogs that look like the Bean multiplied itself while rollicking in its daughters’ metallic-colored piss, your overlooked life is just as important in the daily struggle of our planet. So, where you came from could theoretically matter. And if a lack of narration from Henry Louis Gates Jr. over your ancestry is the high-water mark of failure in your life, consider the trillions upon trillions of other inanimate objects that are similarly un-celebrated. Yes. You are as useless as I myself, and will be sorted right below CARDBOARD, of all things, in the grand Excel spreadsheet listed by decreasing importance.

Except that cardboard, unlike you and I, has a newfound voice. To honor the origins of something as profound as a grapefruit carton, a Japanese reclaimed-cardboard wallet maker tries to bring his material back to its Floridian hometown for a “blessing” of sorts. Replace Dr. Gates’ baritone with that of a contemporary graphics artist dosed with a penchant for ultra-specificity, and the transformation from Finding Your Roots to a very Japanese documentary short is complete. Fuyuki Shimazu’s celebration of the mundane is not unexpected in the age of sub-sub-sub-reddits. Enveloped by oceans of potential knowledge, we are almost encouraged to diversify and become passionately focused in one thing and make irrelevant everyone else’s interests. Only, when you dig further, you find that “someone else is ALSO and ALREADY interested in this shit!?” So we reach for combinatorial esotericism: “Only I am expert on the turquoise crane hawk in the cliffs north of Tonga AND the blue hawking crane of Eastern Seychelles”. This isn’t, of course, a commentary on this short, which is warm and reverent.

But on a facile reflection: should he switch to making cardboard face masks and ventilator bellows, will it make us appreciate the world even more? When the universal units of gravitas have changed, you quickly find everything soaring or crashing on a tornado of an Excel list, which is an indication of how important the list really was in the first place.

PrevPreviousRandom Indie Music Tournament – Round 3 Preview
NextSong Of The Day: The Beths – Dying To BelieveNext

SEARCH

FOLLOW US

Facebook Twitter Flickr Foursquare Rss Inbox

THE PAST

Archives

TAGS

Tags
British Music Embassy (10) Canadian Music Fest (11) canadian music week (20) cmf (10) cmw (42) concert (9) el mocambo (9) fringe (26) Great Lake Swimmers (10) guelph (9) horseshoe tavern (23) hot docs (103) jazz (12) Joel Plaskett (10) jukebox the ghost (15) lee's palace (27) marina and the diamonds (10) Massive Attack (10) mod club (12) NXNE (94) of monsters and men (11) Phoenix (15) play reviews (11) Pulp (11) Roskilde Festival (16) rural alberta advantage (10) sharon van etten (10) suede (12) summerworks (34) SXSW (479) SXSW 2022 (11) SXSW 2024 (11) SXSW Online (18) the antlers (11) the cure (9) the national (10) the xx (11) Tokyo Police Club (9) Toronto (25) toronto fringe (14) Toronto Jazz Festival (55) turf (13) tweeview (10) Video (9) zeus (10)
The Panic Manual

We are a collective of individuals bringing you the latest in concert reviews, indie, britpop, Canadian, twee and all sorts of other music, movies, tv and everything else you like. Follow the manual to live a pleasant and fulfilling life.

All rights reserved