“Frank the Pig” takes on the themes of noir cinema and attempts to quirkily reinterpret them using animation. The end product is a labored and confusing short which fails to use the rich visual and storytelling possibilities of animation as a medium. Overflowing with technical shortcomings, “Frank the Pig” would have benefitted from much more polishing, especially on the screenplay level.
“Frank the Pig” is screening at ShortShorts
The film opens with a mysterious call which the eponymous Frank receives in his flat. He will die soon, for reasons that are never entirely explained in the film. Like in a classic noir story, he is given a sentence and seemingly there is nothing to be done about the fate looming over the protagonist. Is he really bothered by the call? Kind of, maybe? How did he arrive in this situation? And why does he not choose to do anything about it? Although it may seem to be a conscious choice to remain so enigmatic, it is far more likely that the script's superficiality is an effect of not polishing it enough.
Psychological nuance in “Frank the Pig” is definitely not communicated through the visuals which are frustratingly superficial and lacking in detail. Do the dialogues and sound design make up for those gaps? The viewer will quickly realize that the answer to that question is a stern “no”. As one can learn from the end credits, voices heard in the film come from HI Voice, a Huawei voice-assistant app. This explains why the exchanges between the characters sound extremely flat. Some of the conversations are also simply badly written, with lines like “I'm Frank, so let's speak frankly” harrowing the author of this article days after watching the film.
The director-screenwriter, Hiroshi Imafuku, worked on this project clearly with a minimal budget which isn't an issue in itself… if an interesting story was able to make up for the low production values. That is not the case, as the three acts seem incredibly disjointed. Lack of chemistry between the characters and no clear idea for how the film should approach the noir themes only show that “Frank the Pig” seems more like a work in progress than a finished film
