Charming and brutal

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

"The Danish Poet" is an animated short film that runs for 15 minutes and was made roughly 10 years ago. it won an Academy Award in the Animated Short Film category and was, so far, the biggest success for writer and director Torill Kove. Funnily enough, the movie was nominated for best short film at the Norvegian Film Awards (Amandas), but lost there. Kove is pretty successful with the Academy. Apart from her win here, she has two more nominations, one of these very recently.Still, I did not manage to appreciate this short film. It has a touch of everything: drama, comedy, romance, history, but I personally felt that it did not really deliver in any of these areas. In my personal case, it also did not help that I was not fond of the animation style at all. The narrator here is Liv Ullmann. This was one of her last projects, she is not too prolific anymore these days being way into her 70s. Ullmann is probably Norway's most known actress of all time, but don't worry: Her narration is in English (maybe because the NFB produced this) and the characters do not have any audible dialog. The only people I could maybe recommend this too would be Norwegians (or Danes) because of some of the historic references, but even these did not impress me. I am genuinely surprised and disappointed that this managed to beat the wonderfully moving "Little Matchgirl" back 10 years ago. Not recommended.

This is an animated story about "chance" and "coincidence" ruling our lives, something the author apparently believes because it's stated by narrator in the first few sentences of the film that "we are all just seeds floating up there in the space waiting for someone to get us." With an atheistic outlook like that, it's no wonder this won an Oscar for "best animated short." Had the opposite belief been put into film, it wouldn't have stood a chance to be nominated. Anyway, Torill Kove, a Norwegian animator/filmmaker and current resident of Canada, gives us this "cute" story in which a series of circumstances all make for a happy ending. The illustrations are half the fun of watching this 15-minute award-winning short. They artwork is clean and colorful and a treat for the eyes.Liv Ullman does a nice job of narrating the film but I would have rather had a variety of voices. Having a female voice all the male characters sounded out of place.I wouldn't be surprised if Miss Kove did this story tongue-in-cheek, knowing that actually everything happens for a reason, not that all of life is sheer chance. No one is dumb enough to believe that, which is why this is a good fairy tale.

Barely 14 minutes, this is a lovely, animated film short. On the surface it is about a Danish poet who travels to meet someone who inspired him. However, it is really about how small coincidences in our lives determine so many things of significance.As the poet travels, and arrives near his destination, he is on foot and it is raining. He seeks shelter at the nearest farm house. There he is smitten by the farmer's daughter. She is in turn smitten by him. Unfortunate for the poet, she is already promised to another, the neighboring farmer.Their lives go on, other seemingly random things happen, and eventually they are brought back together. And, as the narrator says, she herself would not been born had it not been for the circumstances that unfolded, in the order they unfolded. The randomness of life, and how we react to each situation, that ultimately defines all of us.I saw this on DVD that is a collection of film shorts nominated for the 2006 Academy Awards.

I know Susanne Bier and Søren Pilmark were also nominated for an Oscar in 2007 and didn't win, but this movie won instead, making it a good substitute, since the story is about a Dane.The story is about a Danish poet, Kasper Jørgensen, who lives in Copenhagen, but one day runs out of creativity and goes to Norway on holiday to search for inspiration. There he finds a girl whom he falls in love with, but alas, she is engaged to be married against her will with a local farmer who is the son of her fathers best friend. Instead she vows to never cut her hair until she can be with Kasper again, a promise that she keeps (making her hair look like Marge's from "The Simpsons"). And the story continues from that point..I'm not gonna spoil anything else, but it's all about chance and coincidences.Now, the animation itself isn't that great, although it is very different from how "normal" cartoons looks like, reminds me of the Alfons Åberg-cartoons (or Alfie Atkins as he's called in English).I haven't seen the competition, so I can't say if it was worthy of winning, but it was certainly a very good short movie, with a classical love-story in a new environment. There were many funny details, like the people on the ferry between Denmark and Norway only being drunk (Swedes?) or backpackers, and that the postal office never can be trusted (just like in real life).. thank God for E-mails!