HUNGER (1974) Four stars

Over a span of many decades, there have been several great dinner scenes in the movies.

The Wedding Feast in FREAKS, the cannibal family dinner in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and that famous plate throwing in AMERICAN BEAUTY are three that spring quickly to mind.

Oh, of course, there’s Mr. Creosote from MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE and Peter Greenaway’s THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER. (Perhaps, on the next episode, I’ll cover great diner scenes in the movies, everything from DINER to SUPERMAN II and SUDDEN IMPACT.)

In that Mr. Creosote spirit, we now turn our attention toward Peter Foldes’ historic computer animated short from 1974. We use historic not because of the appetite of the main character but historic works here because HUNGER broke ground in using computer animation. Please keep in perspective it was some two decades before TOY STORY and it took Foldes and his National Research Council’s Division of Radio and Engineering’s Data Systems Group well over a year to make this nearly 12-minute film.

This is essentially a silent film, with no dialogue, no narration, not even intertitles. Just instrumental music and images.

That makes HUNGER all the more effective as a cautionary tale about greed and gluttony in contemporary society. It does not get preachy because of the lack of words or tiresome because of the length of a short. The animation holds our interest and it also gives Foldes no limits (except for the limits of his own imagination) in showing this greed and gluttony. Images rapidly dissolve and their perpetually changing nature points out some striking differences.

In HUNGER, our main character evolves from a skinny office worker into a monster.

A couple minutes in, our main character grabs a bite from the delicatessen before dinner and then he goes through a pig, two fish, everything else on the menu, and the dinner table itself before he takes home the waitress who served him. He sits back down to eat and repeats his business from the restaurant in the privacy of his own home. He really likes swine and then he starts developing a multitude of mouths on his body, as well as more hands to fill all those hungry mouths. Of course, he grows bigger and bigger and even bigger, until finally he’s mobbed by a hungry horde of emaciated figures.

This short came out roughly a decade before the Ethiopian famine of 1983 through 1985 that claimed 1.2 million lives and brought images of starving children to living rooms around the world. How many of us now adults remember from our childhood when our parents, confronted by a plate with food left uneaten, usually something not favored by a child, scolded us by reminding us there’s starving children in Africa. Since it’s approximately 13,000 km between Kansas and Ethiopia, sadly I did not let this scolding affect me in the slightest and I wasted all that food. I’m still a stubborn, picky eater.

Both the images of starving children and the main character in HUNGER stick with me, though, and I am not alone in that respect.

HUNGER earned a nomination for the 1974 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and it competed against THE FAMILY THAT DWELT APART, VOYAGE TO NEXT, WINNIE THE POOH AND TIGGER TOO, and the winner CLOSED MONDAYS (co-directed by Will Vinton). It won a jury prize at Cannes in 1974, the Norman McLaren Award and the Silver Hugo at the 1974 Chicago International Film Festival, and the Best Animation Film at the 1975 British Academy of Film & Television Awards (BAFTA), according to its National Film Board of Canada bio.

 

FIVE MORE HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ANIMATED SHORT FILMS

1. A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1971, Richard Williams)
2. THE DOT AND THE LINE: A ROMANCE IN LOWER MATHEMATICS (1965, Chuck Jones)
3. THE FLY (1980, Ferenc Rofusz)
4. THE OLD MILL (1937, Wilfred Jackson)
5. THUMB SNATCHERS FROM THE MOON COCOON (2012, Bradley Schaffer)

NOTE: All five shorts, as well as HUNGER, can be found through online sources.