The 3rd Short Film Hall of Fame

I would definitely recommend the long version of Eu não quero voltar sozinho a.k.a. I Don't Want to Go Back Alone, (English title: The Way He Looks, I'm not sure why they made the English titles so different) there is more to it, including the main character dealing with wanting to be more independent from his parents (and his friends) and there is some great music in it. And the acting has improved! It features the same actors as the same characters but was made a few years later.

Pas de Deux

More like moving art than a traditional film. Certainly different. It did interesting things with light; I particularly liked when you could only see the dancers as outlines; but the whistling music got on my nerves, and it would have held my attention better if it had been a little shorter.

Two and Two

I can’t quite give this the credit for the idea that others seem to be. It’s not a new concept, in fact a lot of this film seems very directly to echo Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I thought the execution (pun intended) was a bit heavy handed and lacking in subtelty. The imaginary guns would have worked better if they hadn’t had real fire.

Guard Dog

The animation is indeed crude, but I don’t think that is the purpose, if you like, of the film. I quite liked the darkly comic insight into the mind of the dog as it barks at everything on its walk.

Ashes

This is just a montage of images jumping about so quickly you can't tell what anything is. I know it's supposed to be a dream but dreams are often more than flashing images.The bits with the fireworks were better. I just don't think I 'get' Weerasethakul.

Guard Dog

This was a very cute short film and it was a fun concept. It was interesting to see all of the different ways the owner could be killed. The ending was also funny. I like dark comedy, and this was a different brand of it. The animation style is really interesting, and worked well with the story.

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I don't think just a dream, I think I see the film as some kind of meditative essay on where Weerasethakul is from. Thailand, his life, friends, family, the environment, and also his filmmaking. Not just dreams but memories, how much can a single frame capture, how much gets lost in time. You can make out objects, make connections and so on, even if it isn't exactly clear. I thought the jarring images were going to annoy me, but I got into the rhythm pretty quickly

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Elefante

I liked this short a lot. I liked the narration, the editing, and the writing. The concept was very unique and it played out well. If there was any problem I had it would be that the Elephant makeup was a bit silly and took me out of the film.

Glad you all liked it at least to a certain extent. The ending is what captivated me as well, and what made it surprisingly touching.

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That's a bit harsh Guap, even by your standards! I've just watched a couple more of the dog ones and found them quite endearing

A Trip to the Moon

What I love about this short is that it was so ahead of it's time. I can't even imagine how the audience who first saw this short in 1902 must have reacted. The director of this short was a famous illusionist Georges Méliès, and if you are interested in that, I would recommend Martin Scorsese's Hugo, that goes into this film and its creation in great detail. I just think it is incredible that a film made over 100 years ago can still hold up. I would bet that id this short had never existed, many of our favorite sci-fi classics wouldn't have either.

Pas de Deux

I wasn't a fan of this short simply because I'm not a fan of dancing or ballet. I don't want to offend anyone, but it just doesn't interest me. I absolutely respect the talent, effort, and skill that was put together to make this film, but I'm just not a fan. It is nothing personal against this specific short, just dances in general. I thought the visual style was unique, but that was all the film did for me.

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The link didn't work or the video wouldn't play? If it's a problem playing the video, try again at the vimeo site, or perhaps the embedded video here will play.

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I may go back to hating you. It was more fun.

Maybe this link will help. It's a YouTube link to the whole Tokyo! (2008) movie. Interior Design is the first part of the movie.

I Don't Want to Go Back Alone

I thought the film was alright, and it was a very interesting idea, the script was written very well. One of the problems I had was that some of the child actors weren't that great, specifically the girl. I thought that Gabriel and Leonard were played very well, but she wasn't.

Interior Design (Michel Gondry, 2008) - I liked this until it got surreal near the end. The story was interesting, the characters were likable, and most people have dreams, ambitions, and money troubles, so it was easy to relate to what they were going through. But it lost me at the ending. It just didn't make much sense.

Eu não quero voltar sozinho a.k.a. I Don't Want to Go Back Alone (Daniel Ribeiro, 2010) - This one is my favorite so far. It's a nice, simple story about three friends, and their feelings towards each other. It made me want to watch the long version of this short.

Elefante (Pablo Larcuen, 2011) - I liked the idea behind this short, but I didn't really care for the concept of him turning into an elephant. I just had a hard time wrapping my head around that part of the story. But overall, I liked this short, and how the ending was both sad and happy at the same time.

Ashes (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012) - I didn't really "get" this short. It just seemed like a series of pictures, (many of which were blurry), without any kind of story to string them together. I tried finding some information about this on IMDB, but all I could find was a movie from 2012 called Ashes about a son who tries to reconnect with his father who has Alzheimer's disease.

Guard Dog (Bill Plympton, 2004) - This is another short that I was really enjoying until the ending spoiled it for me. I didn't mind that the animation was crude, and I loved the idea that the dog saw danger in everything, and he wanted to protect his master, but I hated the ending. It made it feel like a bad "Twilight Zone" episode.

Success! Do watch it, it's good.

Elefante

This was both hilarious and deeply sad. I thought it was great.

Interior Design

This was... weird. Sometimes a little bit of weirdness is weirder than something which is weird right from the start, because you aren't expecting it as much, you wonder why. I liked the way this was shot, especially the beginning with the rain. The character of the boyfriend was interesting, he's very much a fantasist, seeing everything in terms of some strange film, when it's the girl's life which turns into one of those strange films. I mostly liked it, although it did drag a little bit in the middle.

Magnetic Rose

I thought this was good. At first it seemed like something along the lines of 2001 or Solaris, then when there was all that food laid out in the house of memories and decay it had something of a fairy tale like quality. altogether it made for an effective sci-fi flavoured ghost story with some memorable images. Very well drawn, too.

I have no idea what to think about Guard Dog. The premise was good but some of the jokes weren't for me and, like what GBG said, the ending was bad. I'm glad there was a twist but it could have been much better.

Glad you enjoyed it Thursday Next. Yep the highly detailed art of 1990's high end anime is incredible sometimes.

Do you think so? I was trying to be more polite in my views there. I think that the praise mediocre stuff like that gets is part of the reason why US animation never appears to evolve as it is content to be just simplistic stuff. Another, more important reason, was government intervention into the comic book industry, which lead to it's artistic collapse and retreat into the superhero genre. Since animation is animated comics, the collapse of comics due to government regulation lead to the abortion of the possibility of animation developing as an artistic medium in the US. So US animation still is restricted to animated 3 panel newspapers comic strips without any artistic substance. I though I disliked animated shorts relative to series and movies but that was because I was watching the wrong ones. Stuff like Masaki Yuasa's work or Morimoto's work which Magnetic Rose is the one nominated here, shows that animated short films can be indeed go beyond crude drawings and 3 panel newspaper's comic strip style into something more substantial.

Edit: Finished (re) watching all shorts, so I sent my list in.

I Don't Want to Go Back Alone- Pretty decent short, probably my favorite of the three new ones I've seem (Guard Dog and Two and Two) but they're all around the same zone. This one was simple and felt very real which I liked, I think it would've made a decent feature as well. Nothing ground breaking but a pleasant short film