Ice Merchants

So simple, so beautiful and so meaningful. When I saw their house hanging on the mountain, I thought something would happen to them. Obviously, the man's wife, the child's mother is not alive. It doesn't show it with flashback. Very simple. A yellow glass and an empty side of the bed. Very meaningful and simple. I was expecting a bad ending. But the ending of the movie and the way it was finished impressed me a lot. It was so sweet. Among the ones I've watched (I've only watched 3 nomines yet), this is what I liked and was most impressed with. Also the music was very good. The shooting style is again like hand-drawn. I think it was fashion and style to be nominated for an Oscar. I criticized it. Also, a live action version of it can be shot. We can watch beautiful landscapes.

This short about a father and son living in a tiny cabin anchored on the side of an immense and icy mountain-side cliff is totally absorbing. There is no spoken word but the music is great. Father and son eke out their existence by taking ice to the village far below by jumping off their porch and parachuting down, then they come back up using a rope system. Since I am somewhat acrophobic, parts were a little difficult for me to watch (the son sitting on a swing thousands of feet above the ground - oh my!) but the basic colored line drawings were so engaging and gorgeous that one could not finish the film.

At first the ending is somewhat open to interpretation. Watching it a second and third time I picked up the hints scattered along the way as to what was happening that I had not fully grasped on my first viewing. I so appreciate being able to watch it on The New Yorker Screening Room.

Absolutely gorgeous 14 minute short about a father and son that parachute off a steep mountain daily sometimes stylish and always peaceful! Hugely focused on feeling a sense of warmth even shortly. Ice Merchants is so good the bonding, the look of everything, and impressive! Magnificent and scary when heat finally arrives when the father and son least expect it; I can't imagine living the way they did. The music is quite tranquil and I love how the hat mountain towards the end looks like candy corn. Quite an interesting animated short that defiantly deserves some recognition regardless of win or not would highly recommend!

The first Portuguese production ever nominated for an Academy Award depicts a man and his son who sell ice to make a living. João Gonzalez's "Ice Merchants" is a low-key, unassuming animated short that comes out well done. It just goes to show that animation doesn't need to be fancy, and certainly doesn't need the characters voiced by the celebrities of the moment (to be certain, this one has no dialogue). I found the short on The New Yorker's YouTube channel. I hope that more people get to see it, and that in the coming years more of the animated shorts become available for viewing. Some truly impressive filmmaking here.

Take the drawing style of Ed Gorey, the sensibility of doom of Abner Dean, and the Sysyiphean zeitgeist of, oh, a filmmaker working in Communist-era Eastern Europe, and you'll have an approximate idea of the feel of Ice Merchants.

I'd warn you that any description of the plot would be full of spoilers, but the IMDB tagline itself is full of spoilers! My advice is to watch this cold, without any particular description of the plot, for best effect. You'll get a very deftly done, real sense of jeopardy for the characters, as well as experiencing the strangeness of the whole premise as one is meant to.

It's a parable for loss and recovery, grief and holding on to love, but wordless and without engaging in sentimentality. There's a reasonably nice revelation with a laugh out loud moment as we see something decidedly inexplicable and seemingly extraneous come in at the end. It's really quite touching, and again, if I explained the plot even a little bit, you'd likely lose the emotional sense that this film very adeptly creates.

This was not my first choice among the Oscar nominees for best short animation (we saw them all at one sitting) but it's a credible runner-up. If you're not literally on the edge of your seat watching this, I'd be surprised.