Silicon Docks Silicon Docks

There may be an incredible dearth of animated features in theaters this fall, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t new animated films for those who are looking for them. In fact, Irish writer/director Graham Jones and animator Kasia Wiśniewska have just released their latest feature Silicon Docks on Youtube.

The film’s satirical story unspools during the final days of Trump’s presidency and follows a Dublin pub crawl attended by a group of figureheads from the global tech industry, forced to meet outside their offices by the Covid-19 pandemic. Between rounds, the group debates whether to sign a new EU agreement and engages in petty interpersonal bickering including several gratifying one-on-ones between well-publicized rivals.

“During the pandemic, partly to stop us all from going crazy, we decided to go ahead and make this movie that had been knocking around in my crazy head for a long time – about a bunch of American tech rockstars getting pissed on a rainy Dublin afternoon,” Jones explained in a self-published essay about the feature earlier this month.

“I viewed it as a social or perhaps cultural and maybe even technological experiment. Quite literally, a lab experiment. What happens if we take a sample group, let’s say 10 early pioneers of the web, and subject them to the same kind of distortions that everybody else endures online in the 21st century?” he suggested.

Now, audiences can see the results of those experiments in Silicon Docks. Jones described making the film as one of the best experiences in his career as a writer and director, giving much of the credit to Wiśniewska and her animation. (Jones and Wiśniewska are a husband-and-wife filmmaking duo.)

“We had nothing, we had absolutely nothing and so we used nothing to make it – except ourselves!” Jones summed up, describing Silicon Docks as “a voluntary lockdown project, created utilizing extremely limited resources and undertaken largely for the sake of preserving our collective happiness during these strange couple of years.”

Silicon Docks is available now, non-monetized, on Youtube.

‘Silicon Docks’ (Ireland, 2022)
Director and writer: Graham Jones
Voices: Grace Power, Shane Lynch, Brendan McDonald, Fiona Bawn-Thompson, Bobby Calloway, Rob Smith, José Naghmar, Gerry Cannon, Matthew McMahon
Animation: Kasia Wiśniewska
Production designer: Diep Hoang
Backgrounds: Sonia Egan
Music: Freedom Trail Studio, Futuremono, The Tower of Light, RKVC, Ashley Shadow, Dan Lebowitz

Location:

Jamie Lang

Jamie Lang is the Editor-in-Chief of Cartoon Brew.

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