Bottle Short Film Review

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

I'm a fan of stop animation and this film used the technique to great effect. A Sand Person and a Snow Person, living in two very different places, communicate by sending things from their environment in a bottle to drift across the sea to the other. They pass items back and forth, augmenting themselves with these items as they go. In the end, they attempt to reach one another so that they can be together and are both destroyed in the process.

This film was well made and the filmmaker did a great job of bringing a convincing life to their constructed characters. As with the short film Plastic Bag, they managed to craft a movie in which inanimate objects are anthropomorphized to the extent that the viewer is able to effectively read and understand what the characters are feeling and doing in each scene. On this level, I feel the filmmakers have succeeded. While watching, I felt like I understood what Sand Person and Snow Person were experiencing and feeling and I developed and attachment to them, hoping they would be together by the end. Unlike Plastic Bag, this film pulls it off without the use of dialogue, relying entirely on the character animations.

What I didn't like about this film was the overall sentiment that love is destructive and that everyone is doomed to be destroyed. I may be reading too much into it, but it seemed as if the filmmaker was attempting to convey that:

A: Two people who begin a relationship change one another, seen here as the objects being placed on the characters and becoming a part of them, humanizing them further.

and

B: That two people who begin a relationship will lose themselves completely in that relationship, effectively destroying themselves.

To me, the film seemed to be steeped a bit to heavily in the melancholy themes of "loves equals death" and "everything ultimately sucks" that seem to permeate the indie films scene these days. It looks great and the animations are well executed, however, I find the film lacking when taken as a whole.