the leading man is my tpye

I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

"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.

I first heard of this short when I saw that it was on the same DVD collection of short films as Andrea Arnold's gritty yet thought-provoking 'Wasp' and for a start I didn't know it was animated until I stumbled upon its IMDb profile, which made me want to see it more because I love animation. Upon watching it on YouTube, I found it bizarre yet amusing in parts.The opening and closing scenes of some American tourists in Paris were colourful with accurately-drawn backgrounds but also one of the most unusual parts of the film because I was expecting French dialogue, which was present in 'Ernest and Celestine' but they were speaking English with French subtitles on the screen. The human characters are oddly designed as well but the animation is smooth for the most part. There is minimal dialogue outside the opening and closing scenes and the colours of the scenes of the old lady feeding the pigeons are not the brightest. Although she speaks gibberish, I found her a generous character. The principal male character is grumpy and greedy but I enjoyed watching his bizarre nightmare where some human/pigeon hybrids eat a pig the old lady leaves for them as well as his insides. Another odd part was the repetitive sequence of the man coming to the old lady's flat wearing a papier-mâché pigeon mask to be fed from mid- September until Christmas Eve and progressively becoming fatter. The incidental music is nearly as sparse as the dialogue but I like its authenticity.Out of all four French animated independent films I've seen so far this year ('The Illusionist,' 'The Monk and the Fish,' 'Ernest and Celestine' and this one), this is the strangest one but all in all a pleasant surprise with its funny moments. 8/10.

If you have ever wondered what Sylvain Chomet, the creator of Les Triplettes de Belleville did before that, then I can tell you: it's this, an entirely characteristic, shorter and considerably darker tale of pigeons and policemen, allied to a cruel dig at American tourists in Paris. The animator's Searle-like style is already fully formed and one or two of the beloved character types from Belleville (the dog, the diminutive mother) appear here too. Vieille Dame is not however merely a dry run for the fully fledged feature, more an extended taster of a unique talent. At only 20 mins it is still worth seeking out and is coupled on disc with three other animations laced with dark humour, although sadly not by Chomet. Only available from Amazon.fr apparently as part of a 50 minute DVD, and without English subtitles - although as only one of the four animation uses language to any extent, and the lesser of these too, this is not a real problem. Recommended.