Dreadfully Boring

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

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

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 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.

After seeing Tomek Baginski's "Katedra" I thought nothing could beat it. "Sztuka spadania" is at least as good as the previous film but impressive in a different manner. "Katedra" is a masterpiece of suspense, climate and superb computer graphics skills. In terms of craftsmanship, "Sztuka spadania" shows huge (I dare say) advancement in some areas of lighting, rendering and animation (here I bow low to the whole team of the film's creators). In terms of script/directing it's a whole different story. Whereas "Katedra" made me shiver in awe (realy!), "Sztuka spadania" made my sensors of wicked humor rage! Although some of the scenes might appear macabre, the whole idea, for me, is totally hilarious. The short story is brilliantly spiced up with the music of a Romanian brass band (Fanfare Ciocarlia I suppose). To cut the long story short, "Sztuka spadania" is a must see! BTW, if I could decide on the Oscars... ehh... Next time!

This little short operates on two levels.The first is it's humorous story, that of a bunch of soldiers--we aren't really given who they are or what they're doing there--that are shoved off of a tall diving board to their deaths, and then photographed to be sent to this fierce fat guy who is collecting them for an animation.The second is an exploration of animation itself, as it is done in very caricaturist CG but has the second level of being something of a stop-motion animation. The fat guy takes the pictures of the dead soldiers and puts them into a projector to make a very macabre dance... and nothing is funnier than watching him dance along with hundreds of dead soldiers.Could this possibly be something about the amount of death and toil that goes into making precise art? I'd like to think so, otherwise I can't really see an excuse for it, even though it is quite definitely the perfect example of morbid comedy.--PolarisDiB