The ReelGood Film Festival is back again, and reeler than ever.

But we start our preview of the upcoming festival — taking place at Cinema Lido in Hawthorn, all day on Saturday, April 12th — with films that could only be considered “real” in the sense of the emotions they evoke.

That’s this year’s selection of animated shorts, each made with its own technique, each personal its own way, but all celebrating something about the artifice of animation to get at something very real indeed.

The longest of these is the 19-minute Lifeblood, rendered in a form of digital animation that captures all the wonder and beauty of the Australian outback in a manner that belies its origins within a computer. Nicholas Tory’s film is most accurately described as a tone poem celebrating indigenous storytelling traditions and the need to safeguard the natural world from those who would seek to exploit or despoil it. Nardi Simpson’s sparingly used voiceover is a strong and solemn guide through this world, which touches on the plight of indigenous Australians while never straying from its core goal of presenting the keenly observed surface beauty of a world worth preserving.

Shot in deeply compelling widescreen, Lifeblood presents a series of serpentine paths through its dusty environs — sometimes rivers, sometimes roads — often with a view down on the space from the perspective of an eagle, or perhaps a deity from indigenous lore, who appears in the stars and in ordinary objects. Despite running long for a “short,” Lifeblood engrosses with its details, from insects scuttling along the ground, to lonely windmills churn out air, to a scant few humans living and thriving in among the trees and grasses and abandoned rail tracks.

Perhaps not too far from the main setting and thematic considerations of Lifeblood are those of Darwin Story, a nine-minute short from director Natasha Tonkin. This is a semi-autobiographical story of a woman who returns to her home city to sit vigil at the bedside of her comatose mother, but the main connection in the film is between its main character and another visitor at the hospital she befriends, an indigenous woman. The protagonist hasn’t ironed out all the bumps in her life, and isn’t always in her best form, but this journey may get her where she needs to be in the end.

The director’s Darwin upbringing is evident in the details she captures, from casually prejudiced taxi drivers to the need to avoid coastal areas at night to steer clear of the ever-present croc threat. The animation has the purposefully rudimentary look of a watercolour painted by a talented child, but the technique used to capture it is hardly so simple. Tonkin constructed 3D sets that were hand painted and then photographed, sometimes with a stop motion camera track. The characters were then painted in 2D so they would sit naturally in their environment. The effect is immersive and places due focus on the film’s themes.

The final animated short we’re previewing today is the shortest, the most abstract, and a contemplation of the very medium itself. At least, the animation has an abstract quality to it, even if the subject matter is concrete.

In On Film, director Emma Hough Hobbs divides her appreciation of celluloid into three chapters, each of which contains snippets of interviews with filmmakers who vastly prefer this form of moviemaking to the now industry-wide reliance on digital. First she lays the groundwork on what film is, how it works and how it is developed, then she considers how to recognise whether a film is made on celluloid or digitally, and finally she looks ahead to its endangered future, and what we will lose if it goes away entirely.

The animation sometimes directly accompanies the current comment, though usually visualises it through colourful and expressionistic images that blend whimsically into one another. Other times, the connection is less apparent. Throughout, what appears to be a self-portrait moves through this dreamy world, observing these various visual homages to film and what it has meant to her personally, and to all of us generally.

We will follow with three more previews of RGFF25 over the next ten days until the festival. You can buy your tickets here and get all sorts of other festival info here.