Agent 327: Operation Barbershop

It's really amazing how far the blender foundation has come, from the early days of Elephants dream, Cosmos Laundromat, to Sintel. This is truly remarkable,and just goes to show how much powerful the blender movement really is. Pixar animation studios may bless us with their advanced technology and storytelling, but blender animation studio grants us the power of open movies.

A concentrate animation. Nice, impressive for the technix details and humor, proposition of a sort of James Bond parody, charming for the lead character and for the fight scenes, not great but useful as example of the possibilities of a new age of Pixar. So, nice. And impressive for the great images.

This is really a very short film that almost seems to be a teaser for a much bigger piece of work (given that it is based on a comic book series, and not just a random comedy spy). The plot is simple as we join our British spy entering a barbershop and quickly getting deep into the spy ring. The references are clear, but the material has its own humor and manages to be fast-moving and consistently funny for the 3 or so minutes it is on.

The animation (Blender) is impressive as it has great detail, and really has the Pixar-blockbuster look but on a much smaller budget. Importantly, the animation is not just a technical piece of work, it also gets the delivery just right; the action and setpieces are played out with good comedic timing, and it makes good use of movement of the 'camera' and scenery. It is a very simple film perhaps, but it is as entertaining as it is brief.

I've never read Martin Lodewijk's Agent 327 comics, but a quick comparison of what's available online suggests this cartoon is at least convincing when it comes to the characters. The protagonist comes across as a James Bond/Maxwell Smart-type secret agent, battling menacing villains to keep the world safe.

While I do enjoy comics and cartoons-especially older ones-I'm not sure this short film did enough to make me want to seek out the Agent 327 comic books. I think the main issue is that the short ends so abruptly. It feels like an incomplete story-which, to be fair, it clearly is. If it were longer, I might feel differently.