Night of the Cooters (Short)
Seen at the 2023 Atlanta Film Festival.
“Night of the Cooters” isn’t about much more than the “what if?” of…what if a War of the Worlds-like event happened in an American western town? Actually, as executive producer George R.R. Martin describes at the Q&A after the film screened Saturday night, author Howard Waldrop took, as his starting point for this short story, the H.G. Wells novel, and posited that one of the other ships landed in the American west. The result is a visually-imaginative adventure that director Vincent D’Onofrio and the team at Trioscope animation give humor and a warm heart.
Why D’Onofrio- who continues to delve into genre work as a director- and co. used animation to tell this story is simply a budgetary one; because of the visual effects involved, it seemed the most economical way of doing it. Trioscope’s style here is rotoscope, where they animate over the live-action elements filmed, and it gives the film an unusual, but beautiful, look that fits perfectly with the time period being brought to life. There was another animated western/sci-fi that played earlier in the day at the festival called “Quantum Cowboys,” and the two make a fascinating double feature for how animation can bring to life stories of simple people, and simple fates, while also bringing science fiction into the world in believable ways.
We first see Sherriff Lindey (D’Onofrio’s character) in an outhouse, and that’s going to be a familiar place for him. He starts his day by having to deal with two “miscreants” for stealing peaches before the alien invasion happens, first taking a cow’s life, and then human life. One of the treats of this film is seeing how Waldrop’s story- through Joe R. Lansdale’s screenplay- shows the ways in which these people approach the Martians with what they can, and how the hierarchy of who’s in charge is sometimes sorted out. Knowing that this was made exclusively on a green screen set, where the actors were unable to interact with anything but their actors on a spare set, it’s a tribute to D’Onofrio as a director that we believe every moment. This is just the first planned adaptation of Waldrop’s work Martin has in mind- two more have already been filmed- and I cannot wait to see what’s next.
