Ice Merchants

This short is my pick to win the academy award for animated short. The animation and color story in this emotional, and heartfelt. Such a layered story about grief, loss, love, passion, memories, heartache, adoration, hope, moving on, and finding the silver linings in life is absolutely flooring. The entire piece is a gorgeous, impressive, stylish piece of short form animation unlike any other I have ever seen. I watched it on The New Yorker's youtube channel, and honestly the style and vibe of this animation really fits with the outlet to be their home-it's such a perfect collaboration and the correct vibe. I would love love love to see more work from this talented portuguese animator, mr. Joäo Gonzales, and cannot wait to do so in the near future!

Being able to tell such a story through beautifully simple details is amazing. Ice Merchants is a piece of art like the world needs more of.

The visual art and animation are both provoking and original.

The sound is wonderfully crafted.

The story brought me to tears.

A world where a good short animation like this, created with very little funding, wins an Academy Award is a better one. I really hope it wins.

Also interesting is the fact that ice merchants actually existed, a long time ago, even though that is more of a poetic backdrop to the story being told.

I'm looking forward to author's next creations.

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.

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.

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.