The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

In a long deserted military base a high rickety tower stands high above the ground. At the top is an officer awarding medals to damaged soldiers who survived the war before pushing them to their death on the ground far below. At this point their corpses are photographed by another sinister man and the resulting image sent to his employer far from the site.This is the whole plot of the short, apart from the detail of the ending which I'll not spoil beyond saying that it is oddly comic and darkly weird. In terms of straight animation the ideas and the creation of them are good as the short looks good but also seems to mix styles and produce animation techniques within other animation techniques. It also is delivered with a real sinister air that works well with the more comic (but still sinister) conclusion. So on this level I liked it as a film, but on the downside I did feel like it left me hanging a little bit.It plays like a comment on the disposable nature of life to some within the military (this is a Polish film) whereas from a slightly different angle it appears to be commenting on the treatment of soldiers who no longer serve a use on the battlefield. And I could go on – there are a couple of different readings of this film but it doesn't really help the viewer to appreciate them. If there is a serious point here then the comic ending rather detracts from the seriousness of it; conversely if there is only a rather macabre creative theme to the short, the specifics of the start seem very, well, "specific" for there not to be a pointed commentary aspect to it.Fallen Art still works as a short animation though and it is well created with a dark and sinister air to the comic of the grotesque. I just wish that it had been clearer to the viewer in regards what it was trying to be/do.

I had to make a short presentation for a work not so long ago, using this short film as background and I was quite delighted with it. The fact that I didn't know any work of this filmmaker has led to even more my admiration. There was so much in so short time I could talk about, first with details that are immense, starting with the title, the fact of not having human speech, symbolisms, plus a multitude of them in this cyclical story without end, where everything fit together but you're not quite sure what the main message is. And therein lies the joke of what parallelism may exist with the days of yesterday, today and tomorrow, with different reading each one of us will have after seeing it. I really believe that the major objective of this short was achieved, have fun (yes, because although we are facing a very dramatic story, the humor isn't a foreign language) and bring all the ingredients for us to cook with our imagination and perhaps even more than that.

I have now seen this short film twice. After reviewing it the first time, I received a well written message imploring me to reconsider my review and that I had missed the important anti-war message. So, I have just deleted my first review and have decided to try the film one more time--though I still am very surprised the film received the BAFTA award (the British equivalent of the Oscar).Before I even talk about the content of the film, the first thing that you are bound to notice is the absolutely breath-taking CGI. Despite not coming from a big-name studio like Pixar or Dreamworks, this computer animation is amazing--with rich details and better technical quality than I would have expected from such a company. They deserved lots of kudos for this.As for the content of the film, after looking at the film a second time, I could see the anti-war message just like I did the first time, but I won't go so far as to describe it as "point-less". Sure, there is a point to it--but I just don't think they made it very well. Those who are gung-ho anti-war folks will probably applaud its grotesque message. While I am not some pro-war nut, I just thought that the message was way, way too heavy-handed and gross. Sure, war is bad (duh) but I can think of at least a dozen films off the top of my head that said this better and in more subtle ways.Overall, technically great but not a film I heartily recommend.

It is interesting how everybody was astonished by the visualization in Katedra and in this one. And nobody dig into the story behind. But Beginsky's stories are more than just an add on to the graphics.This masterpiece tells us how some individuals can decide about life and death, and what the army really is. Soldiers are just a tool to achieve the goal of the art called WAR.While the Katedra is more the critique to the church. The man is alone and when the church shows him the 'light' he's captured forever. In my opinion Beginski tries to describe the problems in a more subtle way with great visualization and 3D graphics.