The End

I came by a low-quality AVI file of this animation years ago as a hidden feature on a magazine-cover CD. I still pull it out occasionally for fun - it's that memorable.

It's hard to say any more about such a short film without spoiling parts of it, bar to say that it's a clever joke upon itself - when one of the characters asks the animator to explain something, the animator replies "Listen, I can't say anything more about that - I have to make these metaphors really obscure so that the audience can spend lots of time analysing them".

Truly a 10/10 concept.

This is a decent experimental animation posing as a self-important pseudo-intellectual pile of claptrap. In other words, when you first watch it, you think all you are seeing is an animator trying to impress you with how "deep" and intellectual they are. STICK WITH IT--the animation actually makes fun of these sort of people. You realize this when the super-bizarre main characters begin dialoging with the animator and telling him he's full of it!! This is very clever, however you have to be willing to keep watching the film to get to this and the internal dialog within the animator (who becomes the main character midway through the film). On top of this, the animations score about a 13 on a weirdness scale that runs from 1 to 10! Because it was so different, the Academy nominated it for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. It's worth a look--just hold on tight and force yourself to keep watching!

This starts out as pretentious claptrap. The animator actually tries to be obscure so the audience can confusedly wade through those pretensions and put their own spins on this thing. As time goes along, however, we are let in on the joke and the thing becomes really funny. The art is manipulative and meant to be obtuse. Just enjoy the bit.

Chris Landreth has an imagination not of this world. But it's eerily rooted in the most mundane banality of human existence. You get the feeling that he looked so deep into boredom and despair that he found genius. And that we could, too.

The animation itself, grotesque yet beautiful, bursts with a kind of manic expressionism. You hardly know what's going on, but slowly you realize, that's the point. Landreth has utilized the breadth of the freedoms of CGI to pull the lid off his bizarre brain.

Talk about "thinking outside the box." It doesn't get much farther from the box than this. Watching Landreth's films is like getting a shot of adrenaline into your imagination. It's hard, as a filmmaker, to watch this film and not be terribly inspired by it.

Hopefully Landreth has some more projects up his sleeve -- I'm hooked.