The 27th Chicago International Children’s Film Festival begins Friday, October 22, 6 PM, with an opening-night gala at Northwestern University’s Thorne Auditorium, 375 E. Chicago; tickets are $25 for adults, $10 for children. Included is a 60-minute screening of shorts that should appeal to all ages. The top live-action entry is Sandra Boynton’s One Shoe Blues (2009), with B.B. King playing straight man to some musical sock puppets. Two shorts combine hand-drawn animation and CGI: from Australia, Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann’s The Lost Thing, a surreal meditation on a mysterious beached creature, and from Germany, Johannes Weiland and Uwe Heidschoetter’s The Little Boy and the Beast (2009), in which a youngster is forced to take charge when his newly divorced mother becomes a morose, unrecognizable monster. Tied for funniest are Rob Silvestri’s Canadian short Ormie (2009), a CGI tale of a pig who’s obsessed with a cookie jar, and Alexei Alexeev’s 2D Hungarian animation Log Jam (2008), in which a motley assortment of forest animals get their musical act together.
