This is evocative 3D character animation: we know from Kevin’s snotty tongue and malicious grin that this boy is up to no good. As the sequence evolves, we see that Kevin is greedy, selfish and ultimately, a loser. It’s hard not to feel pleasure at seeing him get his comeuppance.

Unusually, this short film has credits for 'Muzak’ (Stuart Thorne) and 'Vomit’ (Adrian King).

Serving Suggestion Synopsis

Little Kevin (voiced by Philip Joseph) is a snotty boy who doesn’t heed his mother’s call at the supermarket. He steals lollies, gobbles them and spills them, causing an old lady to fall. He runs over her to get his next treat, a box of chocolate cereal decorated with a monkey’s picture, but then he gets his comeuppance.

Serving Suggestion Curator's Notes

Kevin’s snot is truly gross while the monkey’s metamorphosis from a drawing to a King Kong presence is both humorous and dramatic. Knowing the devil is in the detail, director-animator Tony Thorne uses the 3D format to great advantage.

Greedily feeding his face on the cereal, Kevin is too slow to react; the monkey comes to life and stuffs him into its box of cereal. Kevin struggles, but the monkey wins. In a dark twist, Kevin’s mother, with baby in her shopping trolley, adds a new item to her purchases: it is a box of cereal with Kevin’s face on it, and onto which the baby throws up.

Modelled and animated using Alias Wavefront’s PowerAnimator on a SGI platform at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Serving Suggestion is Tony Thorne’s first film. Since his debut, Thorne has been contributing his considerable animation talents to international and large-scale productions like Valiant (2005), Australia (2008) and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009).

Serving Suggestion was nominated for Best Short Film at the British Short Film Festival in 1998.

Notes by Antoinette Starkiewicz