Le Maison en Petits Cubes
This 12 minute film created by Japanese filmmaker Kunia Kato is a painterly description of a grandfather's memories with his family. The film is set sometime in the future where an elderly man living on the topmost block of a tail slender building wakes up in the morning in the small room he calls home. Kunio Kato decided to cast a lonely grandfather s the protagonist of his film when he had an image of a house put in a pile. Kato says,' I showed the image to a playwright, Kenya Harata and we shared the world view of the image. Then Mr Harata said, I think there are memories and his stories of a family at that time behind the houses in a pile and his world led us to begin making a story casting a lonely grandfather as the protagonist.
The old man opens a hole in his floor which reveals a vast body of water underneath and begins fishing. It turns out that most of the world is now submerged underwater and the water level continues to rise. The protagonist living in a house made of blocks seems to spend most of his time adding m ore blocks to his house building a new room on top of the old one to survive the flooding water, He patiently adds the the block brick by brick with the hope of having somewhere to go after the water floods his home. Having done this many times before he seems to have got used to the whole idea of adding new building blocks to his house. One day while taking a break from the addition of blocks his pipe accidentally fails off getting immersed in the deep water.He dons on a scuba diving suits and dives in search of his lost pipes. This plunge takes him on an excavation into the literal depths of his memory, As he descends he relieves the moment that have gone by like his daughter's wedding in his room and dinner with his wife. Each time he goes down a level he enters further into the past tracing his life floor by floor, story by story. Looking back at his life he adopts to the changing circumstances in his flooded water world.
There are no dialogues in the film and the old man's experiences are depicted through striking colorful hand down animation and 2D computer graphics that tells a metaphorically powerful narrative of a grandfather's melancholic and nostalgic feelings evoked in the film, Kato says,' I drew with pencils all of the materials like the backgrounds, The animation and the shades behind them. I wanted to make the handwritten texture and the picture with strong shading and thats because, I wanted people to feel the grandmother profound life from the screen. The production of the film right from storyboard sketches to its implementation was done with th general screen design.
Like it on Facebook, Tweet it or share this article on other bookmarking websites.