There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This short won the Academy Award for Animated Short. There will be spoilers ahead: This short is based on a book written by Shaun Tan, who also adapted this for the screen as well as co-directed. There really isn't a false note here. This is beautifully animated, excellently paced, the narration is superb and it keeps your interest throughout.Essentially, this is the narrator looking back to an incident earlier in his life where he found "something", "a lost thing", something which seemed completely out of place, which nobody else seems to either notice or care about. The boy goes about trying to find someplace where the "lost thing" will no longer be "lost", but instead will find its place.I found it fascinating to watch this around the edges of the main story, because there are a lot of little things going on here which are nice to spot as the story unfolds. There's a steampunk feel to this that I enjoyed particularly. The ending is bittersweet, particularly the final bit of narration at the close.This short is on a Blu Ray/DVD combo release by Shorts International comprised of Academy Award winning animated and live action shorts. The compilation itself is quite good and well worth getting. This short is marvelous and is most highly recommended.

"The Lost Thing": One cute animated short, filled with tenderness and nostalgia, having also a quite original and well made aesthetic, heavily influenced by dystopian and steam-punk stories.Even when the aspect of the human characters isn't anything special, the designs of the mechanical creatures (referred by the narrator as "things") and the sceneries is truly beautiful, with a wonderful use of colors and shapes, with very stylish results.However, it is the nice story what makes this short special, being mostly a fable about how caring about a living being could result in something positive, despite the indifference of the others. The ending is particularly bittersweet and melancholic, though I guess that it fits with overall tone of the story.

'The Lost Thing (2010),' winner of the 2011 Oscar for Best Animated Short, is narrated by Australian comedian and musician Tim Minchin, who I thought an odd choice. The film unfolds like a storybook, so I had envisioned a warm fatherly narrating voice (we can blame Adam Elliot for putting Geoffrey Rush into my head), but Minchin's whiny, apathetic Aussie drawl is completely at odds. But it works. The storyteller is, in fact, a first-person narrator, so it does make sense that he would sound like an ordinary bloke.A young man, while scouring the beach for bottle caps, comes across a bizarre mechanical beast: part industrial boiler, part crab, part octopus (if you can imagine that). The man can't identify this odd creature, but nevertheless gets the feeling that it is lost. He takes it home, where the extraordinary creature is treated with relative apathy by friends and family, so caught up are they in their own dreary lives. The "lost thing" is eventually returned to its home, a vibrant land of mechanical gizmos living in perfect harmony.Co-directors Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan forge a stiflingly Orwellian atmosphere, complete with oppressive shadows, dim lighting, skyscrapers of filing cabinets and administrative forms. The setting is a drab version of Melbourne (as suggested by the trams), set in a nostalgic portmanteau of industrial past and post-apocalyptic future. The graphics are computer-generated, and yet they have all the character and warmth of traditional animation or claymation.

The lost thing rises as a breath of fresh air against an ever rising tide of wise cracking or sickly cute fur balls and violent comic animation fueled by the American market. At around 15 minutes in length "The lost thing" had a production time line sprawled over nearly ten years with the bulk of work done over three years. The required creative control in adapting and complementing a very popular book have clearly been kept in check buy the directorial hand of the original illustrator and author Shaun Tan and very small production team principally Leo Baker, the main animator and computer graphics artist Tom Bryant.It is a simple story which reflects on human natures diminishing observation and appreciation of a world out side the day to day pathway we are all forced to travel by both greater authority and selfish ambition. Childlike observations laced with surrealistic circumstance create the distinctly dream like world of "The Lost Thing" "The lost thing" is short but so visually rich with Shaun Tans remarkable eye for detail it feels complete and invites repeated viewing. If your a little over street wise dudes with stand up comic sarcasm, over blown CGI action coupled with misfiring plots take a medicinal shot of "The Lost Thing". You can not go wrong.