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There are some nice little "easter eggs:" There's the Hills like white elephants in the African Beaches scene and Spencer Tracy cameos as one of the referees in the arm wrestling contest. Nice touch! I wonder, did the contest take place in a dirty, poorly lighted place on purpose? Okay, yeah I'm pushing it a bit there.
One thing bothered me. A fisherman of Santiago's years would never allow his lines to get so messed up as depicted in this short. It's far too dangerous: easy to get tangled up in it, pulled over and drowned like some latter day Captain Ahab. I get it, Petrov was using the disarray to exemplify the ordeal as a way of making up for the brevity but it just fails to ring true. In the 1958 movie note how tidy the coils of line always are. Taken, I suspect, directly from Hemingway's novella though a can't remember for sure, it has been a while.
It's a testament to Hemingway's power as a writer that in his novella -- a long short story really -- the fisherman's cosmic struggle really seems daunting, exhausting and the reader simply wants to collapse on the bed in anticlimax. This animated short comes up a bit, well, short in that regard TBH though it certainly makes up for it in the magnificence of its animation. After painting, manipulating and filming some 29,000 glass cells, Petrov's task must have seemed an equal to that of Santiago.
score 10/10
Speekeezy 29 June 2019
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4966106/ |
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2-12-2019 20:33:30
