Special Delivery

This gem of an animated short shows us what can go wrong when you forget to clear the snow and ice off of your stairs. A funny, nicely animated, wonderfully narrated short, and it's easy to see why it won an Oscar. A typically outstanding feature from Canada's National Film Board.

Canadians have a way of twisting noir into humorous shapes.

This one does so both in the story, and more importantly in the way the world is drawn.

The story is an amazingly clever and entertaining journey of right turns. Its more noir than noir and the jags in the story are so extreme they're really funny.

But what makes this valuable is the way that the world, as drawn, complements this. As scenes change, parts of the world melt into and grow from each other. It is itself a series of unexpected causal linkages. See it. Its good.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Just discovered on Thad's Animation Blog this weirdly funny Oscar-winning short directed by Eunice Macaulay and John Weldon. It seems Alice is going out and tells husband Ralph to shovel the walk before he goes to work. He doesn't and when he returns home, he finds the mailman lying dead on the icy pathway. What Ralph does afterwards and the consequences that result changes all three lives (well, two of them anyway) forever...With the exception of the organ music and the narrator who delivers his lines in the same monotone style throughout, this animated short is silent. Despite the brief running time, Special Delivery has so much going on that every twist the narrator tells and the animators show us earns more laughs than the one before. The only other thing I have to say is I'm so glad I live in a place where it doesn't snow. (though occasionally there have been exceptions...)

This is a convoluted story of the dominos falling when a man refuses to shovel his walkway and the mailman falls and breaks his neck. The clever series of events are fantastic when viewed in the world presented here. It shows how people can jump to conclusions when they fail investigate what is presented to them. Good animation and a neat story.

Despite a darkly-humorous story and some moderately stylish (if unpolished) animation, 'Special Delivery' has yet to leave much of an impression on me. The main reason is something that's been praised in other comments on this site, the narration: it's so flat and descriptive that it undercuts, rather than enhances, the animation, and yet it's really unnecessary, supplying almost no information that isn't obvious in the animation itself. The character design, staging, and action are all competent, but add nothing to the story. The result is a cartoon which could just as easily have been a live-action short film, or even a short story, without losing anything.