Sadly Over-hyped

Great Film overall

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Boy, the artwork in this animated short is nothing short of fantastic. It was brilliant and made this "cartoon" fun to watch despite the sour message. The story is simply showing some huge military guy pushing a man to his death and then some real sicko getting excited seeing a dead body on the ground. It's sick stuff, sadly typical of almost all the material on this "Animation Show Volume 2" DVD. Gosh, what happened to the light and funny stuff? Meanwhile, any movie - short or feature length - that is blatantly anti-military, is pretty sure of getting an Academy Award nominee. Such is the Liberalness of the Academy, so it is no surprise that a short like this depicting military officers as deranged is going to be liked on the Left Coast (Hollywood).Having said that, though, I have to admit I was so captured by the visuals that I didn't really care about the morbid "story." The ultra-fat slob who was dancing to shots of the dead man actually was entertaining, thanks to the music. Still, one wonders why kind of demented brain produces material like this?

In these days of US heading for another proxy war, movies like that are more important then ever. Especially when media today totally controls the opinions of mindless viewers. When they can take pictures of dying soldiers and turn it into entertainment. We see it everyday on the TV screens and in papers. And the public is hungry for more. If it is not cruel and bloody, it is not entertaining to them. Maybe when they themselves or their sons get drafted to fight and lose their lives for all the wrong reasons, they will think again and remember this short animated story by Tomek Baginski. And if some of them survive and come back to the once great country devastated by the WW III, they will have plenty of time to reevaluate whom they voted for in 2008 while standing in the soup line.

I enjoyed Fallen Art more than I did Kathedra (which I would rate 9/10). Kathedra was a stunning & visually elegant film with an interesting theme (The sublimation & petrification of the individual by religion. The mindless growth of religious entities towards the abyss.) Fallen Art has a more accessible & simpler animation style, as well as being extremely funny.Fallen Art is a comedy about tragedy; the tragedy which has defined human existence since the earliest civilizations. The desire to impose order/control via the application of violence. In a word, War. Most specifically, the process of War & the State. This process leads to a macabre form of Art, which becomes the justification for further death & destruction. This process is similar to the process of producing animation (although this analogy is limited as there is a director responsible for a film/animation). It is linked & sequential. It operates on a variety of levels which obscure who is really responsible for the product. Once a step is taken, the following steps are inevitable. No one is responsible as they are just playing their parts in the complex operation. No one accepts any blame for the results. And despite the result to human life, there is enthusiasm for both the process and the ultimate result, the Art of war.Like the best Eastern European animation, there are no intelligible words in the film. And none are needed. The words, "Blah, blah, blah", perfectly capture the "reason" of the process that leads soldiers to meaningless deaths. The smiley face medals are also apt.The real brilliance of Fallen Art is in the final product of the on-screen process, the hilarious dance film created from still photos of the soldiers who are booted to their deaths from the jump tower. In the same way that societies create "Value" from the destruction of their "Enemies" via entertaining propaganda, the meaningless destruction of the soldiers here becomes mass entertainment; a music video. The process of destruction MUST continue or the deaths of those who have already been sacrificed would become meaningless. But there is no real end to the process. The music doesn't really stop. Another chorus or verse can always be added.Even the frog, the voice of external reality, can only croak to record each new death splat.

This little short operates on two levels.The first is it's humorous story, that of a bunch of soldiers--we aren't really given who they are or what they're doing there--that are shoved off of a tall diving board to their deaths, and then photographed to be sent to this fierce fat guy who is collecting them for an animation.The second is an exploration of animation itself, as it is done in very caricaturist CG but has the second level of being something of a stop-motion animation. The fat guy takes the pictures of the dead soldiers and puts them into a projector to make a very macabre dance... and nothing is funnier than watching him dance along with hundreds of dead soldiers.Could this possibly be something about the amount of death and toil that goes into making precise art? I'd like to think so, otherwise I can't really see an excuse for it, even though it is quite definitely the perfect example of morbid comedy.--PolarisDiB