100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Le maison en Petits Cubes / Kunio Kato

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Stephen Cavalier

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2Sc8fD_Kc

Japan / 2008

It sounds French and looks like a European hand-drawn short from the 1970s, but Le maison en Petits Cubes is a Japanese film from 2008. It’s great though, having won the best short film at the Annecy Festival and the Oscar for Best Animated Short. With its hand-painted illustration style and loose, chunky character design, it tells a clever and affecting story with an ecological theme.

In the film (translated as The House of Small Cubes) an old man lives in a city that has been almost completely submerged in water, having to build further ‘cube’ extensions onto the roof of his home to stay above the rising tide. When one day he drops his pipe into a hole in the floor he swims down through the sections of the underwater tower he has constructed, each layer reminding him of a different phase of his life.

Like much pure cinema it is virtually silent and, as with many great works, it’s not afraid to include ambiguities. The flooded city could be an ecological warning or, on the other hand, a metaphor for the passing of time and the way it forces us to move through different eras of life, where we can revisit the past as a memory but we can no longer live there. Or more likely it’s both these things at once.

The film has a similar ambiance at times to another Oscar-winning short Father and Daughter (2008) with its emotionally engaging use of the bittersweet power of memory, combined with a gentle enigma to occupy the brain.

Kunio Kato was previously responsible for The Diary of Tortov Ruddle (2003), a series of surreal adventures featuring a man riding a pig-like creature through a Dali-esque landscape, which seems to have attracted a small cult following online. Since making The House of Small Cubes he has been busy creating animation in Japan for his company Robot and, in 2011-12, made a series of seven animated, interlinking one-minute shorts entitled Scenes for a touring exhibition of his work, each made in a different style and yet to be seen in the West.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!