La
Maison en Petits Cubes, despite the French title, was made in Japan. It's an
intriguing story of a man whose home starts to flood, causing him to build
another home on top of the existing one. Apparently, everyone does this, making
the entire town a series of towers barely poking out of the water. When he
drops his pipe into the water, he begins a journey back into his past as he
stops at each level and reminisces about the time he spent there. It's a
charming story, and (I suspect) it's also a parable about what we might be losing
in the climate change the world is facing, what we leave behind when the world
we knew starts to disappear. My only complaint is that this is the least
visually appealing of the five nominees. The animation is a bit, well, ugly,
frankly, but the story is a winner, the most fully realized of the five
nominees. By the way, the title has been translated into Pieces of Love,
Vol. 1, which I believe is a gross distortion of what the title
actually means in French (something more like "the house of little boxes").
Lavatory—Lovestory is an unusual
tale of a woman who oversees a public lavatory—she takes the "fee"
you must pay to enter—and how she begins to realize that she has a secret
admirer. A series of vibrant bouquets appear when she is not looking (which is
often, especially when reading her magazine filled with fantasies for women),
and she begins to wonder which of the men who come in and out of the lavatory
might be attracted to her. This film is the simplest in terms of its animation,
really little more than line drawings, and the only colors are the ones used
for the different bouquets. Most of the production crew is Russian, apparently,
but all of the words that appear on screen (such as the title of the magazine
the woman reads) are rendered in English. This is a charming story,
delightfully romantic, but a bit of a trifle perhaps.
Oktapodi is the shortest
of these films at only two minutes, but it's a very rich two minutes. In this
French film, two octopi (octopuses?) in love are separated when one is taken to
be the special on the menu that night at a restaurant. The remaining octopus
escapes from the tank at the pet store and begins a wild journey trying to
retrieve his lover from the hands of the boy who has stashed her in a cooler to
remain fresh until dinner time. The colors of this one are luminous and not a
second of the short time is wasted. A real gem of a movie, and one that gives
you the feeling that you'd like to watch even more of these two interesting
characters.
Presto is the tale of a
magician's rabbit who just wants a carrot. He keeps getting thwarted in his
attempts to eat his lunch, a luxury that the magician has already enjoyed. If
you saw WALL-E in the theatres, then you've seen this animated
short. It's clever, as you would expect from the folks at Pixar, and very
slickly produced. The film manages to find as many ways as possible to allow
the rabbit to punish the magician for failing to feed him properly, and all
with the use of a wizard's hat much like the one Mickey dons in Fantasia.
(Yes, of course, I know there's an homage at work here.) While watching this
one again, I was reminded of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he and the
magician keep getting zapped by a magic wand. I suppose there are far worse
comparisons that could be made, given the high standard that those Warner Bros.
cartoons had.
This
Way Up,
an entry from the United Kingdom, tells the story of the most unlucky of
undertakers on the most unlucky of days. After picking up the remains of an
elderly woman, the two men (apparently, father and son) experience a series of
mishaps, all triggered by a chain reaction the younger man starts in the
woman's home. The Rube Goldbergian start to the film sets the tone for much of
the slapstick that follows. The most intriguing of those mishaps involves the
two men seemingly on a journey toward hell with the "ghost" of the
old woman riding her coffin as if it were one of the boats at Disneyland's It's
a Small World ride. Funny, if a bit macabre at times. I kept expecting even
worse things than what did happen, but this one seemed to generate the most
laughs from the audience of which I was a part.
Oscar Winner and My Choice: La Maison en Petits
Cubes, It’s both the most ambitious and successful of the nominated
films. As an aside, I also thought the speech by the director was entertaining,
especially his shout-out to the band Styx.
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