Reflection 3/12/26
Legal Smuggling with Christine Choy
This piece is so clever—it really shows how animation can sometimes convey a story much more convincingly than a live action film. There’s an ineffable quality that animation as a medium lends to any story, and this piece is a great example. The still images and montages as well as the herky jerky movement of all the elements could all certainly have been done much more smoothly and possibly “professionally” with live action, but the rough hand drawn images and jagged cutouts in this piece complements the edges in the story itself. The idea of “legal” smuggling is of course, morally questionable, and Choy’s risky solution to getting her six cartons of cigarettes across the border by wrapping them in her scarf is perfectly illustrated by the quality of these images and the shakiness of animation. The outlandishness and outlaw nature of the story lends itself perfectly to its visual representation.