bob the moo

(2012-04-30 16:36:28)

Funny and imaginative

A suave young man is in love with an image in a picture frame. To find outif the love he feels is reciprocated he picks a flower and, in the timehonoured fashion, proceeds to pick a petal off saying `loves me' or `lovesme not'. He continues this despite the pain of the flower – but then theemotion of loving or not loving manifests itself to him in surprisingways.The story here allows for all sorts of things to happen animation-wise. Each time the man picks a `loves me' petal he is treated to something nice,however each time the `loves me not' petal comes off, his fate is a littleless pleasant. This allows the film to imagine some humorous things tohappen to the man – my favourite being him fighting off his own hand, whichholds a gun to his head, as he tries to pick the `loves me' petal! The filmbuilds nicely and it is a good, if predictable, climax.The animation looks basic at first as it is two characters (including theflower) against a quite ordinary (dare I say – plain!) background. Howeverthe more extreme the events become the more the animation comes into play. I felt this justified the decision to keep a plain background as it made thesudden entry of things (good and bad) into the shot that much more immediateand evident.Overall I must admit to not liking all of Aardman's work outside of theirmainstream stuff like Wallace & Gromit, but I did enjoy this. It seemed topromise little from the start but came off as a well delivered, amusinglittle short.

planktonrules

(2012-04-30 02:26:14)

Worth a look.

While the stop-motion clay work is not particularly good for AardmanStudios (known for their great Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheepfilms), the film is clever and well worth a look. In fact, because theclaymation seemed a tad simple, I was very surprised to see that it wasan Aardman effort.The film is very simple and consists of an odd looking man (reminicentof Jay Leno, actually) pulling the petals off a flower--you know, doingthe old "she loves me...she loves me not" bit. However, in an oddtwist, whenever he says the "loves me not", this is accompanied by verybad things that occur to him. But, when he pulls another petal,everything is just dandy. He finally catches on that this is happeningand it's very funny when he tries desperately to keep the last petal onthe flower--lest it once again unleashed its fury on him! Very cute.