If you come into this short thinking, "Hey, that girl looks like Lilo," you aren't wrong. This short is pure Disney through and through, which has its good sides and its bad sides, but definitely gives off a very brand-name feel.
The story is a Hans Christian Anderson tale about a pauper girl who finds brief comfort in the matches she's trying to sell until the cold eventually wins and takes her life away--not before, however, she so escapes into her imagination to find comfort, warmth, and love. This is a very good story, and in fact is done very well by the animators. It also shows that even though Disney is making shorts again, they're still sentimental fluff on topics the maker's don't really know that much about.
Sure, it's sweet, but it's also impersonal. All the power this short has is really in the filmmaker's use of tropes like the cute homeless girl and the magic warm Christmas tree to tug at our heartstrings, but the film makes no attempt to really give any sense of objective to the works. It's meant to make us feel sad, not make us think or understand. It's sweet, but it lacks substance. In other words, it's typical later Disney, through and through.
I do give it a few props merely for the fact that it's not CGI. The Oscar nominated short films this year were dominantly CGI, and will probably be more so as time goes on, so it's good to see that one particular company is maintaining a different form. Unfortunately, that company is also infamous for their sugar-coated reality and sentimentality, so they've managed to keep that as well.
--PolarisDiB
The story is a Hans Christian Anderson tale about a pauper girl who finds brief comfort in the matches she's trying to sell until the cold eventually wins and takes her life away--not before, however, she so escapes into her imagination to find comfort, warmth, and love. This is a very good story, and in fact is done very well by the animators. It also shows that even though Disney is making shorts again, they're still sentimental fluff on topics the maker's don't really know that much about.
Sure, it's sweet, but it's also impersonal. All the power this short has is really in the filmmaker's use of tropes like the cute homeless girl and the magic warm Christmas tree to tug at our heartstrings, but the film makes no attempt to really give any sense of objective to the works. It's meant to make us feel sad, not make us think or understand. It's sweet, but it lacks substance. In other words, it's typical later Disney, through and through.
I do give it a few props merely for the fact that it's not CGI. The Oscar nominated short films this year were dominantly CGI, and will probably be more so as time goes on, so it's good to see that one particular company is maintaining a different form. Unfortunately, that company is also infamous for their sugar-coated reality and sentimentality, so they've managed to keep that as well.
--PolarisDiB