Powerful

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Norman McLaren was a very prolific Canadian animator who was born in the UK. Most of his films would be described as 'arty' and are pretty much unknown here in the States. However, I've seen several of his films on various DVD collections and I like these sorts of shorts--and was thrilled to see a seven disk set of his work. This particular short is from the first disk.This is a film that has a distinctly small audience. It's obviously something you'll either love or hate---for me it was frankly too weird. It begins with some nice somewhat Dali-like backgrounds. Then, over top the backgrounds some hastily scrawled white painted shapes appear and move about and change rapidly. It's all weird and looks like something Dali, Jean Coctea and Andy Warhol would have loved but he average person would have said reminds them of someone on LSD. Curious and odd...and I give it a 3 because at least I liked the backgrounds...a bit.