MY GENERATION

Duration 00:08:00
Director: Ludovic Houplain
Producer: Maxime Vandenabeele
Writer: Ludovic Houplain

Directed by Ludovic Houplain, My Generation is an animated short film first released in 2018. It’s such an interesting visual experience.

The film offers a panoramic vision of pop culture in general, focusing on many different parts of culture and the Internet as a whole. The short is composed of this never-ending road where cars go through and leave out of sight, but new cars arrive and they also leave, and it’s this circle that never ends. It was a perfect visual metaphor for what is at its heart a commentary on the age of information in which we are all currently living.

So, as these cars go by, different ads pop up in the form of buildings and billboards, and every one of them is clearly intended for a specific audience, and every single one of us is interested in at least one or two of those different worlds.

These worlds are all vastly unique, but are uniformly interconnected into a messy, but very much present union. Sports, the news and politics, sex and pornography, tech, the various social networks, art, religion and so on and so forth. These areas of the Internet all get their little moments throughout the film, and every one of them is carefully constructed and included at just the right times owing to truly accomplished editing and direction from Ludovic Houplain.

So what is ultimately the message behind My Generation? Well, that has to be the power of the media, the power of the Internet and the power of social networks and various information outlets, and how all of this outpouring of constantly arriving new information traps us and in a way even enslaves us. All of these are led by powerful conglomerates, and we are just the consumers of them all, and we sheepishly follow what interests us, but all are carefully constructed to especially appeal to our interests and hobbies.

This age offers both a very entertaining way of life as everybody always has something to read on, but it also offers entrapment as we are not free anymore by constantly looking for new, sometimes even pointless information. My Generation truly gets that, and it paints that picture beautifully through its central visual metaphor and fantastic animation at display. The style is great, the interviews are all very well taken and put into a coherent whole. It’s a film that dazzles you and traps you into its immediate information surroundings, which is exactly its ultimate idea and message. It was shown at Animafest and the famous Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 2018.