SUNDANCE 2021 PREMIERE – Directed and animated by Joe Cappa, Ghost Dogs is a highly creative horror short featured in this year’s Sundance lineup. A ticket to Ghost Dogs bought me a ride on an emotional roller coaster–first impressed by its animation, then creeped out by its plot, laughed, at times, at its wry humor, and in the end, was in near tears by its heart-wrenching ending.

An epitomic example of showing and not telling, Ghost Dogs depicted an evening through a canine’s view. Home alone with only his ball and an automated vacuum cleaner, a dog escapes from his holding pen and roams about his family’s home amidst the leftover trash of a birthday party. As he roams, the dog causes an unfortunate mess, and also meanwhile, the home is haunted by what seem to be the ghosts of pets passed.

The animation on Ghost Dogs is nothing short of superb, employing a style that sidestepped using smoothed lines and picture frames, and instead had roughened drawing lines that seemed to vibrate and look disjointed. Intentional or not, this animation style created an unsettling vibe for the film, even when all was motionless or only something seemingly innocent was happening. This turned out to be a welcome effect for setting an eerie mood for the film, well before any of the weirdly surreal happenings even began to take place.

It did not take long for Ghost Dogs to reach a point of no return from eeriness, as the movie further employed an excellent music score with violins that saw fit to raise the hair off of my skin; think of something that would be used in a trailer for an A24 film. The unsettling animation, spooky sound design, and music score set me on edge before the plot even began, which itself is as chilling as the individual parts that made up the film. A picture tells a thousand words in Ghost Dogs as the film tells so many little stories within its main story by having carefully placed and chosen objects in each frame to build the Ghost Dogs world.

The animation style of Ghost Dogs reminded me of the late ’90s period when parents clearly weren’t paying attention to what we were watching, meanwhile the darker imaginings of Mike Judge and things like Rocko’s Modern Life and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters were creeping into the airwaves. Slightly more cleaned up in animation style and even more horrific compared to those beloved aforementioned shows, Ghost Dogs was a wholly impressive short movie and is a stunning success as one of the few horror shorts featured in the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

8 out of 10