Pablo Boy can be watched here
It is 1999 in Florida, on the eve of the New Millennium. In a storm-swept, run-down coastal town full of boarded-up shops, smashed windows, trailer parks, and makeshift tents for the homeless, teenaged Lindsey is longing for a way out, and for change. “Maybe,” he says in voiceover, “if I could just escape this shitty town, and I could escape the future that everybody expected from me.” Lindsey seeks that escape in cinema – or more specifically in the Pablo 3 theatre, where he is applying for a job. It is not just that he needs the money, but also that films like the ones currently screening there – Princess Mononoke, The Matrix and The Sixth Sense – lift him out of his immediate environment and narrow prospects, and allow him to imagine a bigger world beyond. Yet before he even goes in for his interview, he seeks more immediate escape in his car with a quick bowl from his bong – something which nearly costs him any chance of employment.
“Isn’t that a girl’s name?”, the Pablo’s manager Emily asks Lindsey sceptically. Lindsey’s sexual ambiguity – at least nominally – is part and parcel of his adolescent identity, as the long-haired slacker (under a shapeless hoodie) is in transition from feckless youth to a more grown-up existence, and still more inchoate than fully formed. Indeed applying for that job, and walking through those doors from the grey weather outside into the more inviting old-world allure of the theatre, represents his first unsteady steps into adulthood, even if he is, as Emily recognises from the smell of weed on his clothes and breath, perhaps not quite ready for a rôle requiring responsibility.
Rejected, and his dreams shattered, Lindsey walks back out into the rain. “Maybe this was my reality, cold and hard,” he says in voiceover, “and it was my destiny to end up just like my dad, stuck in a script where you always know what’s gonna happen next.” Except that he is wrong – for whether because he is still distracted by his high, or just because the scriptwriter has other ideas, Lindsey is about to fall victim to a glitch in the Matrix which might just possibly alter the course of his life and make everything ok.
Aside from Jeremiah Johnson’s synth score, Pablo Boy is essentially a solo project, written, directed and animated by Kirby McClure (Spaghetti Junction, 2023), who is also the motion capture model for all the characters (Lindsey, Emily, the janitor Wes, and a mysterious driver in pink cut-off shorts). The memories being reenacted here also belong to McClure, in what is a personal version of the director’s own coming of age. Part hand-drawn and part digitally rendered, the animation itself is stunning – at times hyperreal with incredible attention to the interplay of light and shadows, to the billowing of waves and to the flow of rainwater down glass, and at times almost classically impressionistic in the way the faces are drawn with visible brushstrokes (as though reflecting Lindsey’s stoned perceptions).
At the centre of it all, and even lending McClure’s short film its title, there is a movie house – a palace of dreams in which a young man’s potentially brighter, sunnier future will be forged, as perhaps he, like McClure, is set on a path to becoming a filmmaker. For Pablo Boy is a beginning, full of promise for more to come – and for a new year, decade, century and millennium where that boy will emerge a man.
strap: Kirby McClure’s animated short sees a dreamy adolescent film fan seeking escape and change in a pre-millennial, dead-end Florida beach town
© Anton Bitel
