jennyhor2004
Delightful short film inspired in part by Rene Laloux's animated work, "The Bellies" features a simple story about human avarice and arrogance in controlling nature, and how eventually nature and unacknowledged guilt prevail over greed and materialism. An unnamed gentleman, gross and piggy-eyed, gorges on snails for lunch at a restaurant; his fellow diners, all much the same as he is, eat the same meal in a bizarre co-ordinated Mexican-wave mass action. After lunch he goes back to the company laboratory where visitors await him: he explains the process by which small snails are genetically engineered to grow into ginormous gastropods for human consumption and takes his admiring guests on a tour around the facility. After the tour ends and the gentlemen sign a deal, the self-satisfied owner walks around the facility grounds where giant empty snail shells abound. On a whim, he crawls inside one such shell to assure himself he's not hearing strange ghostly noises … The animated figures are CGI-created while the backgrounds look as though they've been done with pencil and paint. Special effects are computer-generated. The figures don't appear at all realistic but they are meant to satirise self-satisfied bourgeois conformity. There's no speech but sprightly and playful acoustic music accompanied by sound effects emphasise mood and create, sustain and build tension. The whole cartoon has a very clean, spare look in keeping with the sanitised and conformist future society portrayed.The last third of the film is the most surreal and really fits in with a dream-like Laloux-inspired universe: our piggy-eyed company director is forced to suffer as his factory-farmed snails have suffered and must run for his life. The film makes a point about how pursuit of materialist pleasure ends up eating you, how ultimately a culture based on gluttony will cannibalise itself. The giant fork that pursues the man turns into a creepy spider predator with a life of its own.It's a little slow and drags out the story in parts, especially during the graveyard scene where the company director starts thinking he's hearing distant voices … but overall "The Bellies" is an entertaining piece with a surprisingly deep message about a future, materialistic society and how it dooms itself into extinction.
RResende
This was a huge failure to me, but an interesting one. It's not so common to see things like this, when you feel you watched something that was pretty far from fulfilling you, but you know that the filmmaker meant well, and wanted to do something ambitious. So, i'll choose films like this any time over serial copy paste work like so much of what we see.The films slides almost to the horror genre. It's a well built tale about how everything that is a part of our life, in this case the food we eat, gets more and more artificial, to the simulated point of considering that we may start eating ourselves and not noticing it. So we have a curious game of scales, where men start as eaters (of snails) only to become an unwilling cannibal. Think what you want about such a metaphor; it doesn't give me the kicks, although i recognize the validity of this reasoning. It's a good dramatic theme, though.What i cared about was the music, how it is deliberately chopped and made into the narrative. He chooses Bach. To me he is the zenith of western music, forever untopped in understanding the possibilities, and studying one by one the possibilities of using harmony, or melody, or both at once. The piece this filmmaker chooses, the prelude nº2, of the first book of preludes and fugues, is part of one of the most important works in the history of music. That's where Bach addresses all his ideas about layering melodic lines that work both as single independent phrases and as harmonies. The thing is, there seems to be two ways of facing Bach: one which considers him a highly rational filmmaker who, through rationality achieves a mythic, religious, otherworldly transcendency. the other way is to consider Bach for his importance in the development of western music, but understanding that music as soulless, mechanic, even repetitive sometimes, so making him something of composer of historical interest. I stand for the first way. This film assumes the second, and that's where i stand out. Bach as the twisted soundtrack of a cannibal, upside down, decadent lost world? No, i don't think so. I appreciate the effort of transforming his music to make it suit the context, but i reject it being associated with repetition, cold world, empty streets with repetitive facades, enormous dinning tables where everybody looks the same and eats the same. This is not Bach, not for me.My opinion: 2/5 http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com
