The Driver is Red (Randall Christopher, 2017): USA

Reviewed by Savasia J. Vida at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018.

As an animated short with a documentary/autobiographical perspective, The Driver is Red delivers a quick history lesson on the capture of Adolf Eichmann in South America, narrated by the voice of Zvi Aharoni (Mark Pinter). Randall Christopher’s animations are based off the real photographs of the members of the Third Reich in Germany to give a realistic sense of who these officers looked like. The significance of Zvi Aharoni being the ‘character voice’ within the short is due to his role of being one of the agents who found Eichmann hiding in South America, but he did not receive the credit he deserves in history.

Christopher’s work consist of detailed sketches drawn in ink as the cinematographic elements of zooming in and out on certain sketches and slow pace editing invite a sense of realism and documentary conventions. The narrative of the storyline is marked by time stamps throughout the film, as the overall frame of the short resembles how films from the 20s and 30s looked on theater screen; this stylistic feature gives us a sense that the topic of the short is about a historical moment.

The Driver is Red is perfectly short and sweet as it solely focuses on the quest for capturing Adolf Eichmann, without including unnecessary bits of information. Investigating the past through an animated lens is powerful for delivering succinct knowledge to the audience as they can use the visual cues to understand the story better.