"La vieille dame et les pigeons" ("The Old Lady and the Pigeons" in English) offers a comedic look at the lengths to which a person will go for self-preservation, as a malnourished policeman gets into the confidence of an old woman by dressing as a pigeon and getting her to feed him. But it turns out that he's not the only one who has plans in store.An interesting trick that Sylvain Chomet's Academy Award-nominated short uses is the lack of dialogue except for the beginning and end. The only speech comes from stereotypical tourists from the US (those scenes actually have French subtitles). But the point is that this is a clever animated short. I think that these animated shorts are more interesting than the animated features whose sole selling point is star power. I recommend it.

"The Old Lady and the Pigeons" is a 25-minute animated short film from almost 20 years ago. It was done by Sylvain Chomet at a young age and, even if this film "only" won the BAFTA and did not win the Oscar (lost to Pixar)and was "only" nominated, he managed to build a successful career on this short movie. He was certainly not the most prolific filmmaker, but when he made a new movie, it was quite successful. For example he managed to get several more Oscar nominations and that is really not a given as he is not an American filmmaker and his movies never reached great audience figures outside of France.Now about his work here, I would say it is a good movie and he deserved the nomination all in all and a win may have been a bit too much. Maybe this film should only have run for 15 minutes as the basic plot is not really that much for almost half an hour. Still I have to say, it never dragged. With the basic plot I mean a guy who is starving realizes that a pigeon-feeding lady at the park has terrible eyesight and starts eating with the other pigeons from that day on. The woman also takes him home and makes him special meals. Is she really that stupid and blind? This is a pretty good film on the art of make-believe. But who is the artist in the end? Watch for yourself.

This wonderfully dotty short film from the creator of Belleville Rendez-vous, Sylvain Chomet, really is fantastic. It has an original storyline - a starving gendarme, some greedy fat pigeons, a pigeon-obsessed lady, and some wild dancing.The animation puts its grotesque characters (which put me in mind of the drawings of Gerald Scarfe) into a world all of their own, where the gendarme fantasises about food, is irritated by pigeons, and eventually dresses up as one of the birds himself to continually visit the old lady for slap-up meals.'The Old Lady and the Pigeons' is the epitome of bad taste cartoons, a darkly fun half-hour in the company of skewed figures and warped minds.

An absolutely splendid French short about a (to say the least) starving gendarme who discovers a lady feeding pigeons in the park and dresses up like a pigeon in a desperate attempt to get food. Strange indeed. Very nicely done, it really captures the atmosphere of Paris. Great animation, odd story, and the fat American tourists are just too damn funny.