Wonderful character development!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This short was nominated for the Academy Award for Short, Live Action, Losing to Le Poulet (The Chicken). There will be spoilers ahead: Jim Henson, already feeling constricted at being considered a producer of children's programming, produced this experimental film as a way of demonstrating other facets to his work. It's most decidedly not intended for children.It's a visual short, with only four instances where a single word is uttered. Henson plays a man, whom we see all through the short. At the beginning, we see him in a bed in a hospital room. A doctor comes in and checks his heart rate. This is where it starts to get surreal. You begin to hear sounds which aren't typical for the situation-a camera shutter click when he blinks, clicking in place of a heart beat and so on.The editing on this is extensive, as all the scenes are very brief, running seconds in length. Henson is seen in various places, in different clothing and varied surroundings. He's seen on a pogo stick, running, walking, dressed in suits, rags, as a caveman and even as Lincoln for a bit. Timepieces are shown here and there.Henson is shown with a woman, with the inference that she's his wife. The woman also does a variety of things-cut cords, take off clothing, eat dinner, change clothing and so on. There are points in this where, if you blink, you'll likely miss something! Everything revolves around rhythm and time and it all comes back around rather neatly. The ending is good, so I won't spoil it here.So far as I'm aware, this isn't available commercially at the moment, though at one point, I believe you could find it online. Pity, because it's well worth seeing. Most recommended.

Just saw this early experimental short by the creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, on YouTube as linked by Amid on Cartoon Brew. It's basically an abstract animated slide show of Henson walking to work, having dinner with his wife, jumping on a pogo (with other people on that at various moments), etc. All done to a constant drumbeat with occasional cries of "Help!" from Henson. There's some adult humor here so I don't recommended this to children. Some of the cuts and montage that I remember from the Muppets' later TV show "Seseme Street" probably came from here. Anyone who thinks of Jim Henson as mainly a children's puppeteer would probably really be blown away with Time Piece. If you liked this, there's a short Henson did with sound man Raymond Scott called Ripples, also on YouTube. Highly recommended!

This is an experimental film done early in Jim Henson's career--before he achieved national prominence. While I didn't enjoy it and didn't see it as a great artistic triumph (despite the Oscar he received for Best Live Action Short), I am thrilled that he made it because it gave him a chance to experiment and hone his craft. Interestingly, the film has none of his Muppets--even though for almost a decade he'd been using them on local (Washington, DC).The film has a beat (such as drum or cymbal) every second and the action changes--almost slide show style. Much of it seemed rather random, though some of the seemingly random images weren't (such as the obvious phallic imagery). Clever at times, but not a film I'd want to see again.

I remember seeing this short in elementary school (stop doing the math!) and have loved it ever since. It was screened at the same time as "Help, My Snowman's Burning Down" and "Clay", both exemplary shorts on their own, but my favorite was always "Time Piece". The hapless subject's strange situations and his plaintive cries of "help!" (especially when his head was, literally, served up on a platter) were priceless and led to a spirited discussion of the meaning of the film. Now that I know it was done by Jim Henson, I'm not surprised it was so good! A definite must-see for its composition and the execution of the scenes as each jump-cut leads to a new, sometimes visually jarring, sometimes amusing, image.