The Danish Poet

This short film is about a series of coincidences and accidents that led to the birth of the woman who wrote the story.

"The Danish Poet" is surprisingly heartwarming. The animation is simple with lots of soft colours and black borders on all items. It almost looks like a cartoon for infants. I find this particularly charming, as it enables us to regress to our childhood to appreciate all the little things around us that we no longer notice. The story itself is heartwarming and engaging. It made me smile from the heart, which is not something many films can do.

"The Danish Poet" is a beautiful film. Watch it if you have a chance.

I understand that this won the Oscar for the category it falls under when it came out. I haven't seen any of the competition, so I can't compare, but it certainly is great. It's a fairy tale in a modern setting, and not everyone will care for the world view arguably presented herein. This is sweet, without being so hideously overflowing with pure, concentrated saccharine, to the point of viewers risking getting diabetes from watching. It's got a sense of humor, which can be claimed to move towards the ever-so-slightly dark once or twice, and is otherwise almost invariably entirely inoffensive, as the short ought to be, on the whole. Jokes and gags aren't childish, gross or similar, although some of them may perhaps mainly be funny to us Scandinavians, and may not get as big a laugh for those not familiar with the relationships between the countries and their people. The story-telling device of narration is used fine, if nothing new is done with it. The performance is good. The animation is simple, with occasional exaggeration. It doesn't look or feel "sloppy" or downright bad. The plot is nice, and the ending, along with plenty else in this, is cute. I recommend this to all who feel they might enjoy it, and encourage not only Danes, Norwegians and Swedes to give it a chance. 8/10

This is an animated story about "chance" and "coincidence" ruling our lives, something the author apparently believes because it's stated by narrator in the first few sentences of the film that "we are all just seeds floating up there in the space waiting for someone to get us."

With an atheistic outlook like that, it's no wonder this won an Oscar for "best animated short." Had the opposite belief been put into film, it wouldn't have stood a chance to be nominated.

Anyway, Torill Kove, a Norwegian animator/filmmaker and current resident of Canada, gives us this "cute" story in which a series of circumstances all make for a happy ending. The illustrations are half the fun of watching this 15-minute award-winning short. They artwork is clean and colorful and a treat for the eyes.

Liv Ullman does a nice job of narrating the film but I would have rather had a variety of voices. Having a female voice all the male characters sounded out of place.

I wouldn't be surprised if Miss Kove did this story tongue-in-cheek, knowing that actually everything happens for a reason, not that all of life is sheer chance. No one is dumb enough to believe that, which is why this is a good fairy tale.

"Kaspar" is the aspiring poet who's hit a brick wall. His psychiatrist suggests that the best solution might be for him to take an holiday in Norway (it's cheaper than France!). Off he goes where he befriends a farmer who's distant relative twelve times removed is the very poet "Kaspar" wants to meet. He stays at the farm for a while but is soon distracted from his original goal by the beautiful daughter. She is promised to the son of the next door neighbour, however, so he has to return home sad and dejected. She vows never to cut her hair until they meet again and it's only after a very helpful cow and a dead rhymester (independently) intercede that the couple manage to meet again. That gives rise to even more serendipity and the ability of our narrator to tell us all about the story of just how interconnected even the most random of incidents can be. It's a fun animation this, simple line-drawn characters with a solid and quite entertaining story that augments Liv Ullman's narration with some other jovial observations about country living, tourists, death and tradition. I'm not sure it does much for the Norwegian postal service, though!

I know Susanne Bier and Søren Pilmark were also nominated for an Oscar in 2007 and didn't win, but this movie won instead, making it a good substitute, since the story is about a Dane.

The story is about a Danish poet, Kasper Jørgensen, who lives in Copenhagen, but one day runs out of creativity and goes to Norway on holiday to search for inspiration. There he finds a girl whom he falls in love with, but alas, she is engaged to be married against her will with a local farmer who is the son of her fathers best friend. Instead she vows to never cut her hair until she can be with Kasper again, a promise that she keeps (making her hair look like Marge's from "The Simpsons"). And the story continues from that point..I'm not gonna spoil anything else, but it's all about chance and coincidences.

Now, the animation itself isn't that great, although it is very different from how "normal" cartoons looks like, reminds me of the Alfons Åberg-cartoons (or Alfie Atkins as he's called in English).

I haven't seen the competition, so I can't say if it was worthy of winning, but it was certainly a very good short movie, with a classical love-story in a new environment. There were many funny details, like the people on the ferry between Denmark and Norway only being drunk (Swedes?) or backpackers, and that the postal office never can be trusted (just like in real life).. thank God for E-mails!