A légy

The winner of Best Animated Short Film at the 53rd Academy Awards depicts a fly flitting about, all told from the insect's point of view. I understand that Ferenc Rofusz wasn't allowed to leave Hungary to attend the Academy Awards, but someone accepted the Oscar for him. Anyway, "A Légy" ("The Fly" in English) is a clever cartoon. Rofusz probably didn't have a lot of resources, but he had the talent, and that's what you really need to turn out a good piece of work. The Eastern Bloc turned out a lot of good cartoons. I also recommend the old Yugoslavian cartoons.

I get the feeling that members of the order Diptera must sometimes feel as if humans are out to get them.

If one could put a camera on a fly and follow it, what would you see. Here, of course, is an effort to create the fly's milieu so the animators can work around it. For a three minute film, it must have taken incredible discipline to put the fly in places that become interesting. This is remarkable, considering it is a 1980 feature.

This short, an Oscar winner, is an exceptionally detailed effort that can be a bit unsettling at first (particularly for anyone who has problems with depth-perception), but is a fascinatingly drawn and meticulously constructed animation and is a must-see if you like animation. Fortunately, it is currently in-print. Most highly recommended.

Here's a magnificent triumph in everything it's set out to do. You may ask what's so interesting about following the point of view of a fly.

Well, "The Fly" is one of those old school animations that simply isn't done these days unless if there's loads of computers and artificial intelligence involved. Ferenc Rofusz's is very detailed, curious, fun and thrilling to watch, as we follow the fast and furious movements and observations of a fly moving through different spaces, nature and then entering a house where a disaster of sorts will take place as a person tries to get the fly, as it moves through several objects, bothering everyone with its noise.

I got to know the work of Ferenc Rofusz through another curious and bizarre animated short called "Deadlock" (1982), which is also about an unusual point of view (the limited view of a man who's about to get executed by a firing squad), and both works have a great sense of hyper-realism that for a few instances it doesn't feel like we're watching an animated but instead a real image that later is transformed into drawings, all captured by a careful black-and-white cinematography. A most deserved Oscar was given to him and "The Fly", one of the greatest works of its kind. 10/10.

We have to be careful when watching old works because we tend to look at works that, for example, are 40 years old today. The légy doesn't have a plot in itself, however, the ability to show a fly's POV so masterfully is what probably earned it the Oscar.