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

Reviewed by Anton Jacobsson, Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2018

The Driver is Red is an animated short documentary written and animated by Randall Christopher. This film is narrated by the actor Mark Pinter. Some scenes started out as a still image and then after some work Christopher made it all come alive in a way that it was animated like the image was drawn from scratch, which looked really well done. Some scenes were harder to create because he made them using frame by frame animation, and this could take weeks to finish.

We are following a secret agent by the name Zvi Aharoni on a journey of finding Ricardo Klement. Klement who’s real name was Adolf Eichmann. He worked along side of hitler for the nazis under world war II. He later had to flee in the end of the war and made his way to the other side of the world, Argentina.. When Zvi Aharoni thinks he found Eichmann he then reported back and three more agents got down there to help him capture Eichmann and bring him to Israel for trial. It was really important that these agents travel from different places of the world as well as  different times and different flights.

Randall Christopher really got interested in this topic and in Zvi Aharoni so he wanted to tell the story in a entertaining way but still staying really true to the story. He knew that he wanted a narrator but it was really hard to find a great voice. Firstly because finding a voice over actor is really hard and then it needed to be able to talk in a german accent.

I really liked this documentary, it was really interesting to hear a story about World War II that are not that talked about. Even though the film was made out of still images i didn’t feel like i lost interest, this was because of the beautiful animations combined with the voice of the narrator. I really recommend you to see this short documentary.