alexeykorovin

This casual docu covers introductory info on physics, math, cosmology and related stuff. However, the style of delivery is heavily kids-oriented. The art side of this docu is amazing, and there is tons of creativity gone into making every concept interesting and easy to consume by someone who e.g. Doesn't have a higher education and has grown up on bite sized TikTok videos.

About their final thoughts that life and even humanity or life as a whole are just quick blips that won't leave a trace - we actually don't know that yet! Only in 1998 did they notice that galaxies are flying off at accelerating speeds. What else will physicists discover later on? So, it's just silly to make big judgements if your life has meaning or not on some contemporary state of knowledge that's being changed and improved once every few decades.

I'd stay positive. I'm certainly not religious, in fact I'm a militant atheist. Yet I believe that, as long as our knowledge is still vastly incomplete, we shouldn't fall into the "curse of the Western atheist" of the 19th and then the 20th centuries - the meaninglessness and the existentialism. Just accept that we don't yet know the meaning of our lives. Some time in the distant future we (or our descendants) might. Our purpose is simply to carry the torch until then.

The problem with this movie, like it's common in communist/socialist theories, is that it treats society as a "pie" that gets "distributed". In this sense, "distribution" of GDP (goods, or in case on this movie, food) is a zero-sum game. The more one eats, the less there is left for the others. So, the typical concern of a communist is to make sure that no one has more that others, and everyone gets their "fair share" of a fixed-size pie. Even use force, even kill people to achieve this goal. In this movie, the whole population of the prison is 666 idlers who sit on beds all day, doing nothing productive. There is a chef and his crew making the food at level 0. And then this food goes down through levels and levels of these idlers who greedily devour it.

This image simply doesn't match the reality, so whichever conclusions you could have made from this movie as a viewer (e.g. That it's the rich who are evil, or that humans in general are evil) would be worthless. In the real world, people themselves create stuff and then exchange it. In a market economy, ABUNDANCE is the normal state, as everyone is trying to produce stuff, to then sell it to others. Their own greed (the desire to sell and to get money) pushes productivity up. Greed makes people less lazy, more hardworking. The main problem of a market economy is that it's hard to sell what you produce. Hence the ubiquity of advertisements, the marketing tricks, and the consumerist mentality (people learn to buy and consume far more than they need, because industries need them to keep buying and buying the goods). So, a market economy has zero relation to what this movie shows.

Though typically in a market economy questions arise if those who are the most productive or those who organize businesses get unfairly too much. Those concerns may often be valid! But there are 2 caveats. 1) No one is forced to work at jobs, everyone can always start up their own business, and the society even encourages that! It's just that most people are lazy and risk-averse, so they won't start their own business and prefer the mediocrity and the security of having jobs. 2) Even with the high inequality of wealth taken in account, free market economies still provide greater wealth to is poorest members than othe types of economy do (e.g. Planned economies). The poorest person in the US is by far better fed, clothed and entertained than the poorest person in North Korea. The vast majority of the population in the USSR lived well below the poverty line in Western free market economies.

The movie is fun to watch, and the premise in it is unique and interesting. But does it have any actual relevance or value? No.

Another of Adam Elliot's stop-motion animated cartoons about lives of small people from the working class and the underclass, with medical issues, hunted by unlikely yet very damaging/punishing and sometimes fatal accidents. While I gave all other cartoons of this animator a 10/10 (and I very rarely give 10s), to this cartoon I'd give a 9.5 - because I didn't like the little bits of preaching in the end - while the message is okay, it just feels less like art and gets somewhat boring and too middle class-y. Besides, the cartoon takes a too sad tone in its second half, which doesn't combine well with the mostly hilarios, upbeat and dark-humor filled first half that's in tune with the Adam Elliot's usual style.

The joke I probably liked the most in this cartoon is how an "International film festival" gets attended by 4 people, of which one is a close relative of the director presenting the film. If you ever tried to do something creative, you'd know oh so well that that's how you will start and most likely end your creative career.

I'm partially Russian, so the theme of "small people" that Adam Elliot explores feels close to me. Because this topic was one of the favorite ones in the 19th century Russian literature. Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov are the names. I guess Adam Elliot likes them, too, and carries the tradition over into the 20th century and to the medium of animated films. Instead of a poor middle-aged paper pusher working in an authoritarian agrarian society, in Elliot's world it's now a person on welfare or someone doing menial/odd jobs in an industrial society.

Note that Adam Elliot doesn't put these characters into the 21st century though. There are no smartphones or computers or the Internet or TikTok or Youtube or computer games where these small people could find solace nowadays. That's probably because all this digital stuff is not very friendly to stop motion animation. Because computers are mostly about perfect geometric shapes and flat colors - something that plasticine can't deliver well. Because of this, these cartoons have a retro feel to them. It's as if they're about our moms or even grandmas, not about ourselves.

I'm not sure but maybe, if Adam feels like he'd want a change of scenery, he could think of making a cartoon in the similar technique but about virtual worlds? Like, avatars of real people in some virtual game? Or VR? This would help these cartoons become more relevant to younger audiences. I'm 43 so I kinda in-between, touching both the pre-digital and the digital eras. Can't really say how Gen-Z would perceive Elliot's stuff. Anyways, I think Adam Elliot is a genius. I keep hilghly recommending his cartoons to people I know.