Overall, the visual quality of each segment is very high. The stories are a bit mixed. Blutch's ongoing story with the hounds, Charles Burns story with the bugs, and Mattotti's monster tale were all very good. The ending of Mattotti's story disapointed me a little, but that's because I miss good ole fashioned monster stories*.
Caillou's Japanese ghost story was alright, but felt structured kind of oddly. If I remember correctly, the editors split it up, ruining the build.
That interlude with all the neuroses and geometric figures was annoying.
The last story, by Richard McGuire is flat-out excellent. Everything comes together so nicely and for once I was genuinely scared. In fact I don't think I've been that scared in quite a while. Hey, and he did it without gore! It was completely wordless too. The situation and plot development was all he needed. That and the style worked perfectly for the suspense. The choice of having blobs of white on black was absolutely the right decision. And it didn't overstay its welcome nor revealed too much. It's definitely the textbook on how to make scary short animations.
Overall, definitely worth a rental. A little uneven, but always interesting.
* Why can't they just call it a monster and leave it at that? I like monsters. They don't need to be grounded with "oh, it was only a mutant bear/cave man/whatever."
Caillou's Japanese ghost story was alright, but felt structured kind of oddly. If I remember correctly, the editors split it up, ruining the build.
That interlude with all the neuroses and geometric figures was annoying.
The last story, by Richard McGuire is flat-out excellent. Everything comes together so nicely and for once I was genuinely scared. In fact I don't think I've been that scared in quite a while. Hey, and he did it without gore! It was completely wordless too. The situation and plot development was all he needed. That and the style worked perfectly for the suspense. The choice of having blobs of white on black was absolutely the right decision. And it didn't overstay its welcome nor revealed too much. It's definitely the textbook on how to make scary short animations.
Overall, definitely worth a rental. A little uneven, but always interesting.
* Why can't they just call it a monster and leave it at that? I like monsters. They don't need to be grounded with "oh, it was only a mutant bear/cave man/whatever."
