The Danish Poet

A sweet, loving, humorous tale. This is two stories. First, it wrestles with the issue of where we come from. Secondly, it tells the story of a Danish poet who lost his inspiration. It took him years to pull himself out of his perpetual angst when he meets a good woman. This won the best animated film in the year produced. It is colorful, not preachy, and innocent. Nice work.

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.

A touching story about how everybody falls in love and ends up happy apart from the ugly one who got crushed by a cow.

"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 watched the Academy Awards and saw this win, and of course, hadn't heard of it. I stuffed the memory of it in the back of my head and when I finally remembered, finally looked it up online, I was blown away by how wonderful it is.

The Danish Poet is a great story, that I've often considered to be true, in that maybe the little things in our lives do shape our path. It's full of these wondrous little moments that make you sigh, make you laugh, make you say "awww..." It's quite probably the best film I've seen this year, and given that it's 15 minutes long, that's saying something...