The greatest movie ever!

Just perfect...

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Spielzeugland4 And A Half Out Of 5Spielzeugland is a plot driven short feature about a kid whose dream to visit an imaginative land and the catastrophe it breeds for the mother. The combination of fragile and destructive energy had never blended or compared to this extent, especially when it is fueled by the unseen force which is depicted metaphorically in multiple ways. It is rich on technical aspects like production design, editing and background score although the cinematography could have been a lot better, but it's a minor and a feasible flaw in this stunning masterpiece. The writing is smart, layered and adaptive that grows as it starts aging on screen and something that won't leave the audience even after the curtain drops; a though-provoking concept.The stunning camera work, morale conflicts, unfathomable intense drama and its eerie perspective are the high points of the features the helps elevate the momentum of the sequence. The screenplay by Bunners and Freydank is poetic with just the right amount of emotional touch that never overpowers the essential plot on screen and still manages to drive the whole feature with it. Jochen Alexander Freydank; the co-writer and director, has done an amazing work on executing the anticipated vision on screen whose impact leaves an endearing scar among the audience. It is scored majestically on the performance objective by Julia Jager whose portrayal helps convey the emotions out fluently. Spielzeugland is a maternal instinct gone wrong, projected at such a critical point, that no one possesses the potential to question it.

This is what the little German boy shouts when he is given back to his mother and taken away from his best friend who is about to go on a journey to Toyland. Obviously he is going somewhere else, a much darker place and even if little Heinrich does not exactly understand what is going on, he still realizes that it has to be something sinister. This 14-minute short was written and directed by Jochen Alexander Freydank and won an Academy Award and many many other prizes at film festivals all around the globe. It is a bit sad to see that, to this date, Freydank (and his co-writer) have not managed to build on that Oscar win at all in terms of full feature films, although he has been more prolific in recent years than right after the big victory. So maybe there is hope. Julia Jäger, on the other hand, the lead actress has been very prolific before and after this film.I personally thought this was a good short movie. The actor who played the Jew father did a very fine job without even talking and the rest of the cast were all solid too. The best (most ironic) moment is when the Nazi officer apologizes to the mother for the unlucky circumstances right in the face of hundreds of Jews who are about to go on their last journey. What I did not like that much was that it is not narrated in chronological order. I guess otherwise my rating may have been even better. And the mother is not the smartest either if she believes she can keep the son from joining his best friend by telling there are huge teddy bears in Toyland. Obviously, the whole Toyland idea was a massive lie to confront her son not with the evil that was going on (if she was understanding it herself), but the consequence of this lie was finally that little Heinrich was confronted with it as much as it could have happened. Good movie. Recommended.

"Toyland" is a film that works so brilliantly that it managed to be powerful, thought-provoking and even gut-wrenching than most Hollywood films that are 8 to 10 times longer. With sparse dialogue, director Jochen Alexander Freydank keeps us hooked throughout this superb short film.Set during the Holocaust, a German woman frantically searches for her son, who might have decided to accompany his Jewish neighbors to a Nazi concentration camp because the Jewish family's young son and her son are best friends.The film is elegantly shot and wonderfully acted. There is more poignancy and true emotion in this film than I have seen in most Hollywood films in recent times.Director Freydank moves his story along, with us always wondering not only what comes next but how this is going to end. And then comes the denouement: A truly remarkable twist that says much about the human spirit. It is a moment that will break your heart while simultaneously make you smile.If you have the chance to see this, and the other Oscar-nominated live action shorts, do yourself a favor and watch them. Believe me, it will be time much better spent than, say, on "New In Town" or most any other mainstream Hollywood film.

Today I went with three friends to a special showing of all the films nominated for the 2009 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. Oddly, the four of us were in pretty much agreement about the films. Our pick for best of the nominees was PIG ("Grisen"), though ON THE LINE ("Auf der Strecke") was a very good film and is nearly as deserving of the award. We predicted that TOYLAND ("Spielzeugland"), however, will win the award because it's the sort of the film the Academy tends to like AND because PIG might ruffle some feathers because it is not "politically correct". I'll update this review after the awards are given.TOYLAND is a film set during the Nazi era. A boy asks his mother about why all his neighbors (all Jews) are disappearing. She explains that everything is okay and that they have gone to "Toyland". Unfortunately, it sounds like such a nice place that the kid hopes to go there, too, and the film begins with him sneaking off with a shipment of Jews to the concentration camps because he wants to visit this magical place.Much of the film consists of the mother trying to find the boy and eventually the SS officers help her to try to locate the boy. This all ends in a marvelous twist that I won't reveal here, but this twist takes the film from the ordinary to the extraordinary.A lovely film that will probably win--in part, because the film is about an important subject that the Academy seems to like, the Holocaust (and highly reminiscent of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL), and in part because it is so exceptionally well-crafted from start to finish. My only reservation is that the print was awfully dark--practically everything looked black at times. Perhaps it was just a bad print.UPDATE: It's official, TOYLAND is the winner. This didn't surprise me at all and it was well deserving of the award, though I was still pulling for PIG to take the honors.