- guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 May 2006 00.00 BST
Football
'Four million boys want to be footballers. But only eleven make the team. The rest of us can dream'. But we should probably all watch out for the lasagne, just the same. With the beautiful game dominating the headlines this month all the way from the FA Cup final to simmering World Cup fever, Cybercinema has gone football crazy. And we're kicking off with Gaby Dellal's fizzing, fast-cut comedy short in which soccer-loving schoolboy Midge plays ball literally from morning till night. But can he convince his gin-and-fag-ash mother (a sweetly stumbling performance by Helena Bonham Carter) that it's all in a good cause? Dellal's ability to sprinkle the frame with grotesque or fanciful touches (false eye-lashes mating like beetles, a plume of lost homework fluttering behind the dribbling Midge) usefully undercuts the Billy-Elliot-in-boots factor.
Oddball Football
Jason Tammemagi's super-stylised and jaunty animation for the Irish Film Board not only strips away soccer's hype and hoopla. He's also pared down the players till they're just zinging dots on a screen, looking more like Pong than the Premier League. What's left is a gripping saga of high drama and low tactics, as the Blues and the Oranges grapple valiantly with streakers, police charges, pitch invasions, and the filthiest fouls since Vinnie Jones.
A Soccer Story
Oscar-nominated in 2000, and garlanded with trinkets from the festival circuit, Machline Paulo's warmly nostalgic account of how a Brazilian star was born during a 1950 favela league football final is a leisurely delight. Give it the 22 minutes it demands, and you can immerse yourself in the David-and-Goliath battle for the junior league cup that makes men out of chirpy narrator Zuza and his teammates. Unless you are absolutely allergic to sepia-tinted Cinema Paradiso-style heartwarmers, you'll be sobbing like a little girl before the final whistle. Who's the team's secret weapon? Watch for the bicycle kick.
Badgered
Those among you who'll be dashing online to escape the ubiquitous cup final TV coverage can take refuge with Sharon Colman's charming and covertly political wildlife comedy, which was nominated for this year's Oscar for best animated short. Her curmudgeonly hero is a badger, whose sett and snooze are disrupted when his home is co-opted as a missile bunker. He's a gorgeous piece of work, a confection of puzzled pencil-point eyes and scrabbling paws as he tries to get forty winks rather than a three-minute warning. Wear headphones, and you'll get the full benefit also of Rupert Degas's talented 'animal vocalisations'. Badgers harrumph a lot, apparently.
Dad's Dead
Football fever or not, I couldn't let the BBC Film Network's featured animation, an extraordinarily accomplished and disturbing piece, slip past me this month. Chris Shepherd seamlessly merges and manipulates live action footage and eerie animation to turn the story of a Liverpool lad's high-rise friendship and betrayal into an unsettling cautionary tale. Narrator Ian Hart delivers every twisted detail with relish ('He made hamsters fly, and sprayed pigeons with car paint') but its Shepherd's scribbled-on images of defiled youth that will force a shiver from viewers.
Hansen's Eyebrows Pinball
Cybercinema is filling in the weary wait until June's World Cup excitements with Matmi's impertinent but thoroughly absorbing sports game. As The Turnstiles' stirring but unofficial anthem observes, 'Hansen's eyebrows/ They go UP and DOWN', which makes them the ideal flippers for this pinball soccer extravaganza, in which your arrow keys help them ricochet the ball off innocent linesmen, police constables and papparazi, and on into the net. Scores stack up with an agreeable speed once you've worked out the 'Bobby Dazzler' space-bar kick, and the very fast-fingered and dedicated player could win themselves a flatscreen TV by topping the high-score table. Or they could get a life.
