Fantastic Short Film Friday - La Maison en Petites Cubes (animated)

It's time for another installment of Fantastic Short Film Friday. With a new Oscar season upon us, I wanted to take a step back and look at past nominations and winners. This week I want to highlight an animated short film that's been criminally under-seen called, La Maison en Petites Cubes (The House of Small Cubes), the 2009 Academy Award Winner for Best Animated Short Film from Japanese director Kunio Kato. This goes to show you that even the prestige of winning an Oscar award won't drive large amounts of people to watch short films. This may be due to the fact that it's at times hard to find many short films available to watch, even if they are winners. Here's the synopsis of the animated short:


As his town is flooded by water, an aged widower is forced to add additional levels onto his home with bricks (cubes) in order to stay dry. But when he accidentally drops his favorite smoking pipe into the lower submerged levels of his home, his search for the pipe eventually makes him relive scenes from his eventful life.

A group of dvds called, A Collection of Academy Award: Nominated Short Films were released for the years 2005-2007. Sadly, it appears that they weren't particularly profitable, because there hasn't been a new dvd released for 2008 and 2009. Still regardless of the fact that most people seemingly don't care about the short form of filmmaking, I love them. So I hope this small blog can bring some new eyeballs to these sorely overlooked gems. Here's the animated short film La Maison en Petites Cubes in two parts. It's interesting, fun and painfully touching.