This short was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short, losing to The Lost Thing. There will be mild spoilers ahead:
Somewhere Jonathan Swift is smiling and scratching his head. This is satire laid on thick in six coats. The main problem here is, while this is funny and entertaining, the satire is about as subtle as a brick through a window. When I first saw this, I was convinced that absolutely no one could miss the point. An image of Abraham Lincoln breathing in toxic fumes and keeling over surely can't be taken seriously, after all.
Sadly, there appear to be people who missed the obvious. Simply put, the intent here is to point out that our ancestors didn't follow "planned obsolescence", which is almost a given these day. "Use it up, wear it out, do it in or do without" will clearly not be the norm these days, though it used to be.
This is making fun of conspicuous and wasteful consumption. It fair slaps you in the face with a fish to make that point. That's what keeps this from being more than a rather cute time filler. It would have been better had it not been so ham-handed in it's presentation. It reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live sketch where they had Garret Morris in an inset doing the news for the deaf by screaming at the top of his lungs.
I liked it well enough, I just wish they'd used a defter and lighter touch here. To be fair, judging by some of the response I've seen, a more subtle turn would probably have gone over heads in any case, This is worth looking for and watching at least once.
Somewhere Jonathan Swift is smiling and scratching his head. This is satire laid on thick in six coats. The main problem here is, while this is funny and entertaining, the satire is about as subtle as a brick through a window. When I first saw this, I was convinced that absolutely no one could miss the point. An image of Abraham Lincoln breathing in toxic fumes and keeling over surely can't be taken seriously, after all.
Sadly, there appear to be people who missed the obvious. Simply put, the intent here is to point out that our ancestors didn't follow "planned obsolescence", which is almost a given these day. "Use it up, wear it out, do it in or do without" will clearly not be the norm these days, though it used to be.
This is making fun of conspicuous and wasteful consumption. It fair slaps you in the face with a fish to make that point. That's what keeps this from being more than a rather cute time filler. It would have been better had it not been so ham-handed in it's presentation. It reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live sketch where they had Garret Morris in an inset doing the news for the deaf by screaming at the top of his lungs.
I liked it well enough, I just wish they'd used a defter and lighter touch here. To be fair, judging by some of the response I've seen, a more subtle turn would probably have gone over heads in any case, This is worth looking for and watching at least once.