New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
CT native wins awards at Sundance Film Festival, SXSW
Puppets are served dinner with a side of romance in a new award-winning short film by a Connecticut native.
“Bug Diner,” created by Redding native Phoebe Jane Hart, centers around a diner in the desert, run by a mole and a fly waitress. The diner’s patrons consist of animals like grasshoppers, an anteater and a cat that are going through different relationship journeys.
“We have a dissatisfied marriage, a secret crush and workplace fantasies. All their secrets and desires come to a head in this diner,” Hart said in a YouTube video posted by the Sundance Institute.
In January, the film won the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Jury Award for animation and was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film. The film festival is an annual event that aims to give smaller film creators a platform to reach new audiences.
“We didn’t stop laughing at this from start to finish. It has that magical effect of making you walk around all day with a smile on your face. The dialogue was incredibly written and the animation style was amazing,” the festival’s website reads.
Hart also won the Special Jury Award for the Animated Shorts Competition during this year’s SXSW film festival, the festival announced in March. SXSW is an annual festival that showcases interactive media, music and films.
The movie was created using stop-motion animation with puppet characters. Hart created the puppets using materials like wire frameworks, faux fur and epoxy (a chemical compound), she told Animation Magazine in February.
Their eyes are hand-painted and have interchangeable mouths held together with magnets so they can be easily swapped to show different emotions. The scenes were filmed in a miniature diner set piece that Hart described as “about the right scale for a Barbie.”
“I think the hand-painted eyes I made really brought the puppets alive. One of my professors, Stephen Chiodo, told me to paint the eyes with some clear nail polish to give them some glisten. It was that moment my puppets suddenly came to life,” Hart told Animation magazine.
While the filmmaker is receiving recognition for her animation skills, that wasn’t how she planned to enter the film industry. Growing up in Redding, she originally wanted to be an actress and she moved to New York City to join an acting conservatory, she said in a news release. However, she struggled to find work and returned to the Nutmeg State to live with her parents.
Hart then attended Western Connecticut State University in Danbury as a visual arts student and she credits the experience with helping her gain a passion for animation.
“I fell in love with animation as a medium when I realized it was my gateway into filmmaking without a million dollars,” Hart said in a YouTube video posted by the Sundance Institute.
After graduating from WCSU, Hart continued to pursue her newfound passion at the California Institute of the Arts, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Experimental Animation in 2023. Her award-winning short film was her thesis project at the institution.
Hart told Animation magazine that she originally intended to create a simple story about a girl working in a diner that was run by bugs. However, pent-up “feelings of distrust and sexual frustration” she experienced in a relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the end product.
The filmmaker added that creating the animation was the most difficult part of making the short film. Because the equipment is shared by students, she had limited time to use it each time she borrowed it.
“Don’t get me wrong, I loved every second, even the three seconds of film that took all day to make,” Hart told Animation magazine. “So, out of necessity, I animated eight minutes of animation in 60 days straight, which any animator I think might tell you is masochistic and I highly don’t recommend it.”
Despite the challenges, Hart said that she is “dying to make another film,” which she intends to be a prequel to “Bug Diner.”
“Much like the short, it’s filled with raunchy puppet scenes and a similar tone but centered around exciting new characters and …. murder?” Hart told the magazine.