City Paradise (2004)

Tomoko arrives in London from Japan and comes across a secret underground city. When she finds it, everything changes.

Director:

Gaëlle Denis

Writer:

Gaëlle Denis

Stars:

Hiroe Takei, Robert Stevenson, Rachel Phillips

Nominated for 1 BAFTA Film Award. Another 8 wins & 3 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview:
Hiroe Takei	...	Tomoko
Robert Stevenson	...	Neighbour
Rachel Phillips	...	Alien 1
Katerina Athanasopoulou	...	Alien 2

Storyline

Tomoko arrives in London from Japan and comes across a secret underground city. When she finds it, everything changes.

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Plot Keywords:

swimming pool | swim suit | subway | rain | london england | 

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Genres:

Animation | Short | Fantasy

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Details

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Release Date:

June 2005 (USA)

Also Known As:

Paradiset under staden

Box Office

Budget:

£50,000 (estimated)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Passion Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

6 min 6 min

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Connections

Featured in The Animation Show 2007 (2007)

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Soundtracks

Peach, Plum, Pear
Written and Performed by Joanna Newsom

User Reviews

Interesting look, cool music but still all a bit too weird

A young Oriental girl sits at home learning useful English phrases about how bad the weather is. When the time comes, she sets out to go to her diving lessons at her local pool. Rushing into the public area she falls and knocks her head before falling in. In the water she finds herself in a place that could not be in a public swimming pool and investigates.

This film was one of the annual (I think) series of films that are shown under the Animator In Residence (AIR) programme where new animators are funded and presented with a television audience (in this case in the minutes immediately after the channel 4 news at 7pm). Other years have presented some very inventive and very attractive short films – at least one of which has won a BAFTA (The Dog Who Was A Cat Inside). This short delivers a plot that I struggled to put into words because it is just plain weird but, at only three minutes long, this is less important than the overall quality of the film itself. The animation uses a mix of styles and it comes off generally pretty well. Aesthetically I preferred the underwater bits to the stuff that seemed to be a mix of reality and animation – the latter style always looks creepy to me and put me off a little bit. The short ends with a bewildering conclusion to events but does close with a cute little song and some cool end credits – although they were difficult to read and made the job of adding this film to the database to be a lot harder!

Overall, a strange film that is more about the animation than anything else but it is still nice to be able to turn on television and see new work like this being put out there for people to find – if only the BBC did more of this rather than mostly leaving it to the commercial station of channel 4 to carry the bag for new talent.