In a deserted villa, frogs leap about the pool and grounds, entering the kitchen, bumping against switches, gradually revealing what has happened.
If there was a "best technical animation" Oscar, this would get it. The entire movie, in retrospect, was created in a computer, yet created with a photorealism that even now I find confounding. Yet I am left with the question: is animation what is left over when you are done photographing what is happening in the real world? I find that too all-encompassing to be useful, resulting in the vast majority of special effects in the history of cinema being animation. Something inside me whispers that animation must somehow be about content.... not about trick photography that could have been done by the Disney Organization in their True-Life Adventures in the 1960s, or even photographed by Len Powers for Hal Roach's Dippy-doo-dads in the early 1920s.
Or maybe I'm just a stick-in-the-mud arguing that they didn't do things that way in my day, by cracky. It's not the story that is revealed. I'm a big boy and I've seen worse things. I just don't think it's an animated story, even if they tell it that way.
