Sunday, August 01, 2010

In the Attic: Who Has a Birthday Today?

Every day Buttercup bakes a cake and her three friends toss a die with 5 blank sides and a birthday cake on the sixth side to determine whose birthday it is today.

Stop motion animation has been popularized by Wallace and Gromit, but tends to be the poor cousin to the output of Pixar et al. This Czech film is based on discarded toys and other rubbish left in a capacious attic. Buttercup is a doll and her three friends are a lazy teddy bear, a pompous, windbag marionette soldier and a frenetic plasticine man with a bottle top hat. In fact it is fascinating to try and identify the junk that appears and often re-purposed into machines by Curie (the engineer and radio announcer), or used by the baddies.

Like many good stories for children there are other themes aimed at accompanying adults. In this case the baddies have over tones of a Soviet style regime, led by a talking golden, glasses wearing bust. This authoritarian leader has hots for Buttercup and Soviet style persuasion techniques, but never fear her friends are coming to her rescue (if the cat doesn't get them).

Ian's rating 3/5
Anne's rating 4/5

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