Overview
In a world filled with beautiful and harmonious music, elderly Vernon always seems to strike the wrong note.
Reviews
2 min readVernon misses every note. The short does not.
I keep thinking about the air after the last instrument goes quiet, which is a fancy way to admit a fifteen-minute animated short got stuck in my head. Mikey Hill's The Orchestra premiered at the Golden Kuker festival in 2016, picked up a nod, and then more or less vanished. That burial is the mistake.
Hill does not throw a frame away.
Vernon is an old man at a piano in a town where everyone else seems to speak music without effort. People hum on the street, tap tabletops, sway to tunes you cannot hear. He keeps hitting the wrong note.
The whole plot is that miss, and it is plenty. What aches is not the sour sound. It is the look on his face when he hears it too.
Animation still gets filed as kids' work. Hill uses it because a lecture would ruin the feeling he wants. The film barely talks.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsTwenty-one thousand drawings for a shy man and a pot plant.
Mikey Hill did the math in a Vimeo comment after a stranger said they loved every second. Fifteen minutes. Nine hundred seconds. Twenty-four frames a second. About 21,400 drawings. That is the only honest gossip on a Melbourne short that TMDB filed as a Swedish 2016 cartoon. The work is Australian, hand-drawn, latestnetflix.com argues, and older than that catalog stamp. 
Vernon is elderly, lonely, and chronically off-key. Tiny musicians follow people around and play whatever they feel. Vernon's band is a wreck because he is. A neighbor moves in with her own ensemble. He tries to teach the little versions of himself to play together before the last chance walks off. John Power, Kate Cawley, and Hill voice it. Jennifer Smith co-wrote. Melanie Brunt produced for Feather Films. Jamie Messenger scored it. Peter Lowey led animation. Markus Kellow did sound. Screen Australia helped pay. Hill's earlier shorts were Norbert in 2007 and The Not-So-Great Eugene Green in 2009. He told Tribeca this third one ate more time than both.
Festivals said yes. The Academy said maybe.
The National Film and Sound Archive kept a clip of Vernon fussing over a dying pot plant while his mini-band plays out of tempo. AACTA nominated it for Best Short Animation in 2015. Flickerfest gave it the Yoram Gross Award for Best Australian Short Animation. St Kilda in 2016 handed Best Animation and Best Original Score. NFSA counts 38 awards and more than 100 festivals. Animation Magazine later wrote that the short qualified for 2016 Academy Awards consideration. Qualification is a screening rule. It is not a nomination. Print the rumor as a rumor.
Tribeca put it in the 2016 shorts out of competition as a New York premiere. Australian Cinematographer Magazine's James Cunningham watched it there and wrote that it represented Australia in New York. The festival page lists Lauren Kleiman at Showtime as press contact. That is a real line on a real page. It is not a purchase. Paris company Autour de Minuit handled sales. Feather Films in Melbourne held the print.
The film then sat in festival limbo until Valentine's Day 2020, when Animation Magazine pointed people at the online debut. YouTube copies now carry an Ouat Media license. TMDB still dates the Swedish release October 2, 2016, fifteen minutes, English, animation. The catalog year is the year the circuit peaked, not the year Hill finished the last cel.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.