This visually amazing achievement in clay animation begins with a live action man closing up a lecture hall and reaching into a box in which he snips the string holding a scrawny, almost skeletal puppet. Unconstrained, the puppet cautiously wanders the darkened rooms in the world of the box. The dismal vibes and infectious musical score suggest a tone of seclusion and senselessness, constraining us into direct empathy with the puppet as he deals with a domain of his reality, which is full of simple machines and mechanisms and man-made amusements. As he seeks to conform, or is coerced, of which we are never quite sure, the film little by little bares how fruitless the environment essentially is. Soul and strength are slowly reduced to expose the phase of life as a macrocosm.
The idea of a puppet being cut loose from its string inside of a box of dark rooms to wander about without aid is fascinating, but lots of people could make a movie that basically revolves around the idea of a wasteland where nothing ends, nothing concludes. It's quite easy. It's basically an excuse to trail off on a stream of consciousness. However the Quay brothers have done something organic and beautiful by telling a story with images. The understanding of cinema intrinsic in Street of Crocodiles is important and exceptionally valuable. Its concept is in truth a very deeply imagined allegory for a mind-shiftingly objective philosophical, perhaps existential, perception, taking life as a whole and putting it in the context of another impression of it, a smaller sort of spin-off of human life, causing us to rethink our existence.
The idea of a puppet being cut loose from its string inside of a box of dark rooms to wander about without aid is fascinating, but lots of people could make a movie that basically revolves around the idea of a wasteland where nothing ends, nothing concludes. It's quite easy. It's basically an excuse to trail off on a stream of consciousness. However the Quay brothers have done something organic and beautiful by telling a story with images. The understanding of cinema intrinsic in Street of Crocodiles is important and exceptionally valuable. Its concept is in truth a very deeply imagined allegory for a mind-shiftingly objective philosophical, perhaps existential, perception, taking life as a whole and putting it in the context of another impression of it, a smaller sort of spin-off of human life, causing us to rethink our existence.