I saw this at the 2007 Palm Springs Festival of Short Films and it's a stunningly well made visual and audio experience. This is the story of Madame Tutli-Putli, who in her 1920's era clothing boards a train with all her earthly possessions packed in dozens of suitcases and trunks and heads into the evening sharing a car with two men playing chess, a man and is son and a menacing-looking and acting man who she all see's as people from her past. She descends into a nightmare as the train rolls across the remote Canadian countryside. This film won the Best Animated Short at the Toronto Worldwide Short film Festival. Fimmakers Chris Lewis and Maciek Tomaszewski are the writers, directors, editors, sculptors, art directors and animators of this stop action puppet short. They used sets combined with animation and used models for each puppet to correspond with the animation and filmed live action eyes for each puppet which both combined give these stop action puppets a half human looking appearance. The Sound team of David Bryant, Oliver Calvert and Gordon Krieger have put together a great film track and Bryant teams with Jean Frédéric for the film's wonderful mysterious musical score. Josh Walker provides special effects and Laurie Maher photographs. Lewis and Tomaszewski researched and formulated ideas for this film on a train trip across Canada. They have a cult following with their comic strip Untold Tales of Yuri Gatarin. I would give this a 9.0 out of 10 and hope to see more from these filmmakers.
