Ryan

Ryan, which won the short animation Oscar in 2005, belongs to a very specialised genre: live action with animation. Not cutely, as in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but astonishingly, grotesquely, and very fittingly for a documentary study of a drug-ravaged master cartoonist of the 1970s, Ryan Larkin.

The 14-minute short was designed and directed by Chris Landreth, an American animator and former engineer working in Canada. Larkin was an Irish-Canadian Montreal resident, one of whose own landmark short cartoons, Walking, was itself an Oscar nominee (in 1970).

He died in 2007 from lung cancer that reached his brain. A heavy smoker and alcoholic, he'd only managed to lose his drug addictions by the time (2003) that Landreth interviewed him in the canteen of a Montreal hostel for the homeless.

Landreth's unique approach to a bio rightly wowed his Oscar academy peers. He'd "interpreted" filmed heads of interviewees (himself, Larkin, the man's former woman friend, and one of his producers) and digitally modified them with freak effects, swathes of coloured strands, metallic structures and lost parts. Ryan's limbs became wooden branches, Landreth's preachiness about Larkin's beer-drinking earned him an illuminated halo, and all of Ryan's brain explodes with anger when recalling his past lack of money and access.

The "making" of the short animation is detailed in a 52-minute documentary Alter Egos, written and directed by Laurence Green. It's more revelatory than its punning title might suggest, and it's disappointing that Green has no further entries in his IMDb page. He sat in on Landreth's interviews, production meetings and, most interestingly, Landreth's private screening of the short film's tape for Larkin in his hostel.

Already described as "emotionally fragile", the tremulous, doe-eyed, near-stammering Larkin is clearly upset by the presentation of his skeletal body, angry edginess and deformed mind. The artist hadn't fully realised what he'd let himself in for, and Green's documentary intensifies an audience's pained awareness of Larkin's psychological difficulties. Landreth claims that he'd hoped to "evoke a feeling of sympathy", and lets the artist explain his inability to cope with the "mathematics" of movie production.

He compares his labour-intensive work to that of 13th-Century monks illustrating manuscripts. One senses why cocaine brought him release and inspiration, and then killed his art by overloading him with ideas ("every 3 and a half minutes").

Landreth's only other IMDb-recorded creation since his Oscar triumph is The Spine (2009), another co-production by the National Film Board of Canada. That should also be worth a serendipitous discovery on a DVD. With luck, it too will have a useful "making-of" extra.