I have to admit that this film has two very important and creative aspects to it. Firstly, it uses a lot of different styles of drawing and mixing of other footage to create its animation. Secondly, it's about the only stream-of-consciousness animation (or even film) I've ever seen, which is fundamentally important because the very process of making a film (and especially an animated one) is slightly too labor intensive to be stream-of-consciousness. Those are both very neat aspects that make this an original and unique experience pleasant to behold.
But what it is, really, is anticlimactic. As the dialog in the film itself states, it is the movie he promised, but not the one expected. Furthermore, while the story is gritty and real, and the emotion effect profound, there's still a large level of personalness to it that isn't very audience-engaging. Obviously the poor guy who made this has some stuff to work out, but does that stuff need to be a dialog with the audience? It's a dialog in his mind, and has all the features of a dialog in the mind, but one thing that's different between a dialog of the mind and an imagined dialog to share with an audience is that the latter has a completely different language to it beyond the regular aspects of a spoken language (in this case English).
When holding a conversation with oneself in one's own head, even giving another voice to the other side of the conversation, there are unspoken and completely understood interpretations that are useless to even convey in the conversation because both voices automatically understand them being from one source. When creating a discourse to be understood by an outsider, there's a different means of presentation that involves an almost structurely linear (even in stream-of-conscious) presentation of events that either reveals slowly or can hold off information 'til the end, requiring multiple viewership in order to fully extract its needs. This film is caught up in the circular and arbitrary motions of the internal conversation without a good structural presentation for an audience, thus making some of its scenes superfluous and repetitive and making other assumptions about things the audience should understand that they don't. In the end, this short is such a personal production that it needn't have any audience but the guy who wrote it at all.
I'm not saying that just because something is personal means it shouldn't be shared. I'm saying that somewhere there must be a compelling engagement with the audience for them to share in the personal aspects, which this film doesn't provide. It's a well-done work of art, it just doesn't take the responsibility of narration.
I'm glad he got it out of his system though.
--PolarisDiB
But what it is, really, is anticlimactic. As the dialog in the film itself states, it is the movie he promised, but not the one expected. Furthermore, while the story is gritty and real, and the emotion effect profound, there's still a large level of personalness to it that isn't very audience-engaging. Obviously the poor guy who made this has some stuff to work out, but does that stuff need to be a dialog with the audience? It's a dialog in his mind, and has all the features of a dialog in the mind, but one thing that's different between a dialog of the mind and an imagined dialog to share with an audience is that the latter has a completely different language to it beyond the regular aspects of a spoken language (in this case English).
When holding a conversation with oneself in one's own head, even giving another voice to the other side of the conversation, there are unspoken and completely understood interpretations that are useless to even convey in the conversation because both voices automatically understand them being from one source. When creating a discourse to be understood by an outsider, there's a different means of presentation that involves an almost structurely linear (even in stream-of-conscious) presentation of events that either reveals slowly or can hold off information 'til the end, requiring multiple viewership in order to fully extract its needs. This film is caught up in the circular and arbitrary motions of the internal conversation without a good structural presentation for an audience, thus making some of its scenes superfluous and repetitive and making other assumptions about things the audience should understand that they don't. In the end, this short is such a personal production that it needn't have any audience but the guy who wrote it at all.
I'm not saying that just because something is personal means it shouldn't be shared. I'm saying that somewhere there must be a compelling engagement with the audience for them to share in the personal aspects, which this film doesn't provide. It's a well-done work of art, it just doesn't take the responsibility of narration.
I'm glad he got it out of his system though.
--PolarisDiB