(Flash Review)Using the metaphor of building a house taller as water around it rises, this neat little short is a touching tale of how one keeps working through life while reflecting and holding onto choice memories….in my opinion. Very original animation styles and appropriate music as there is no dialog. Well worth the 12 minutes.

This short deservedly won the Academy Award for Animated Short. There will be spoilers ahead: The short takes place in a world where the water level is rising and people have to periodically build new stories onto existing structures. The focus is on one old man building his new story. During the transition from one story to the next, he drops his pipe in the water.The old man ultimately decides to go after the pipe rather than replace it. So he dons diving gear to begin the journey through his home to retrieve the pipe. As he descends through the structure, his mind "floods", so to speak, with memories of the past, particularly those concerning his wife.His memories take him back to before the flooding, even back to his childhood. This short is all about memory, life and loss, all very deftly and poignantly handled. The old man retrieves more than the pipe by the time he returns to the top and his current life.This marvelous short is available for viewing online and is well worth seeking out. Most highly recommended.

Today I watched a wonderful little animation, upon which I accidentally stumbled. La Maison en Petit Cubes managed to make a dent in the otherwise so rigid structure of my daily pattern.The theme here is about keeping a grip on your own life adventure; in this case in a very physical way through the stacking of houses over time. The setting is one where (through climate change probably) the world's water level is continuously increasing. As a result of this, people are forced to build on top of their own houses to 'keep their head above the water'. The beautiful thing depicted here is that one's house tells their life story. The old man, while moving his possessions on floor higher for the umpteenth time, dives down into his own memory. As he floats through the old spaces, their stories start to unfold before his eyes. He sees the development in reverse order, starting with grandchildren and ending with the relationship with the love of his life. On a less joyful note: I couldn't help but seeing similarities with the theme in the Pixar animation 'Up' - which makes me doubt the originality of the latter.Short as this story may be, it gave me a wonderful insight into the nostalgia that spaces of a home can give, and how brilliant it would be if we would live in a new space every so often, thereby preserving the previous one as a ready-made personal history book.

As much an example of the beauty of ever-less-present hand-drawn animation as well as an ode to the slow passage of time, this short film from Japan is an extended metaphor for how things slowly get washed away over time. An old man surviving in his one-room house above the tide drops his pipe into the deep waters that have sunk the foundation of his home up to several stories high. Finding no other pipe suitable as his trusty old one, the man rents some scuba gear and dives down to retrieve it, only to be hit by a flashback of his dead wife. Delving into further rooms, he is hit by memories of the past, all the way back to the foundation of the house itself.The tone is perfect and firm in this animation, both in the drawing style and the music. The film breathes nostalgia and loss, which can also say something about its old school hand-drawn animation and even to the sepia tones of silent film. It's a love story in reverse, too, as the man goes from a place of isolation and loneliness to a full life filled with love and care before your eyes.--PolarisDiB