ShortList 2015: ‘The Pride of Strathmoor’ Combines Gothic Horror, ‘Raging Bull’ and Walt Disney

Director Einar Baldvin took inspiration from wildly disparate sources for his creepy animated short

If you tally up the time it took him to hand-draw thousands of pages, stain those pages to make them look like old journals and then edit the result into the nine-minute short “The Pride of Strathmoor,” it took Einar Baldvin about two years to put together the disturbing and spooky blend of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, “Raging Bull” and even a touch of Walt Disney.

But if you factor in the time it took him to learn to box, to train as a boxer and then to actually fight for three years, the short film that’s now a finalist in TheWrap’s ShortList festival suddenly becomes an even more formidable undertaking.

“The Pride of Strathmoor,” which was Baldvin’s masters thesis project in the animation program at USC, takes the form of a 1927 journal from a Southern preacher — a bitterly racist man who’s haunted by visions in the days leading up to a boxing match between a white champion and a black fighter whom the preacher wants desperately to believe has no chance of winning.

“I wanted to make something in the classic horror tradition, where the stories are often in a journal format,” Baldvin told TheWrap. “I also wanted to make a boxing film, something I started thinking about when I first saw ‘Raging Bull.’”

But Baldvin didn’t think he could do justice to boxing unless he studied it — so after he finished his undergraduate studies at CalArts, he went back to his native Iceland, where he began training, sparring and studying boxing history.

His key, he said, was the early 20th-century career of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, who faced open racism as he fought for and then defended his title. “I thought it would be interesting to combine this narrator who is an extreme racist with an approach out of old Gothic horror — for him to construct a reality where it’s possible for his white fighter to lose to a black fighter, it has to be a supernatural turn of events.”

The film immerses viewers in the point of view of the preacher as he goes mad in the days leading up to the fight. The images are bold and dark, hand-drawn on paper that Baldvin sprayed with coffee to make it look stained and aged.

And while a horror story with a vile racist as the central character may seem a far cry from the animation of Walt Disney, Baldvin said, “One of my teachers was an old Disney animator, and I would pick his brain a lot. A lot of the designs and movement are inspired by older Disney work, by the witch from ‘Snow White’ and some of the older cartoons. Everything is rounded and the characters have bigger eyes.”

Still, he admits: “When people see this movie, Disney is not what they usually bring up.”

Watch the film above. Viewers can also screen the films at any time during the festival at Shortlistfilmfestival.com and vote from Aug. 4-18.

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