Film Spotlight:
Sunny Side Up, directed by Misha Felix
Program 2: April 22 at 5pm

Sunny Side Up, directed by Misha Felix, utilizes child-like scribbles and unusual sound design to guide the viewer through the experience. The minimalist animation is used to its fullest, creating fluent movements that blend into one another. Frying pans to plates, eggs to eyes, yolks to tears, snot, cars, and flies to speed lines. Cuts between images are used sparingly, and when they are, the images often join via matching shapes or movement. 

 

Images and sounds connect in numerous ways that subvert expectations. An eerie air surrounds the pairing, but with seemingly no cause, as familiar sounds mix with images out of the ordinary. Usually associated with bundling up in warm clothes, zippers are here recast as the sounds of flies buzzing. Eggs sound like meaty goo as they slide around. Phone messages resound and repeat like a metronome. It all contributes to creating an uncanny world that resembles ours and warps it into something unsettling without a discernible reason.

 

Every image is scrawled in black on a white background and accentuated with smatterings of yellow. The focus of the viewer is directed with the film’s usage of color, and constantly reminded of its egg-centric origins, even when it is used on shirts, ducks, and text messages. This visual throughline connects the film together and ties it together with a diverse soundscape.

 

Like much of Program 2, Sunny Side Up distorts our sense of the familiar, it brings new meaning to images and sounds we may have looked past in our busy lives. This is in spite of the fact that each and every one is ripe with artistic potential. 

 

-Connor Newman, WOEFF Intern, BFA Film Production ‘23