User Reviews

An American sailor meets an Asian girl, makes love to her on the rocks near a beach, leaves for his ship and goes home with his crew. The woman has a baby, waits for the man to return several years later. He finally does, but has a girlfriend (or wife) and takes his Asian child with him. The poor woman - a puppet - disassembles herself (suicide?) but then reappears at the end with a butterfly.

Sound strange? It is, and that "isn't the half of it," as they say. This animated short, inspired by Puccini's opera, "Madame Butterfly" will fascinate some and annoy others. I was fascinated and enjoyed it.

The weird things? Well, here are a few other examples: the baby is a fish at first glance but then a human; an umbilical cord stays attached so mother and daughter fly each other like kites until the father comes back; there is a sex scene which also shows the man fondling the woman's breast; the father and wife (?) are duplicates of "Ken and Barbie;" and there's more.

To those reviewers who stated that they didn't quite know what to make of all this, I concur.....it's a strange one....but a very haunting, involving story, at least to me.

This is a totally bizarre animated short--so bizarre that it's by far the weirdest included in THE ANIMATION SHOW DVD presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. In addition, it's extremely mature--kids should NOT be watching cartoons with full frontal nudity (and the same might go for adults as well!).

The film begins with some native girl having sex with a blond sailor. Despite the characters being almost like Barbie dolls (though made in a cruder fashion), they are anatomically correct and we get to watch them. The guy departs and some time later, a goldfish pops out of the lady and it then grows into a small girl before our eyes. Oddly, the umbilical cord stays attached to them and the little girl gets to fly around like a kite! Believe it or not, it gets MUCH weirder and I'll just let you see for yourself what it's like.

As for the animation, it's different but not particularly great. However, the music from Puccini ("Madame Butterfly") and the creativity of the short is amazing. This is one you best watch and turn off your brain so you can enjoy it. If you don't, then your head might just explode!!

This is an animated short released by the National Film Board of Canada. There will be spoilers ahead:

With some changes, the plot here is that of Madame Butterfly, truncated to fit a bit over ten minutes. I'm going to primarily comment on the animation here in this review.

This is stop-motion animation using doll-like puppets. This is most decidedly not intended for children, as there are adult themes and depictions throughout. The child born to the woman and the sailor is a girl and remains attached to her mother by the umbilical, for instance.

I say "doll-like" because that's what the puppets basically are-dolls. In fact, when the sailor comes back, wife and carload of offspring, most clearly of mixed parentage (sailor boy was busy) the wife looks for all the world like a Barbie clone.

One word of warning: the ending of this holds true to the ending in Butterfly, but it ramps it up quite a few notches. It's not for the squeamish.

This short was released on DVD as part of The Animation Show, Volume 1 and is one of the many highlights on a particularly strong DVD release. This short and the DVD come highly recommended.

This short is VERY weird, weirder than a lot of weird animation that is weird for weird sake, weird because it isn't exactly supposed to be weird but it's just weird.

A doll has a one-night-stand with a sailor, has his baby, waits for him for a year or so, and ultimately ends up alone. It's a pretty easy to understand story, though the presence of Barbie in it is a little... weird. The thing that gets me is that the main character doll is ugly (and I think a little intentionally so...) and some of the symbolic actions done go all over the place. A fish child incubation thing is odd enough, but the doll's self-mutilation is weird too because why is she so mechanic suddenly? Who are these dolls and how does this all work? This is definitely not a self-confined world they exist in, which I think is the point. I can say that the short is very surprising! but in unexpected ways that kind of break away from a comfortable narrative.

Thus, I don't really know what to make of it. To be honest, I'm all for it's approach, I'm just not quite sure it was done well. I like the short, but I don't think I can watch it very much because it unsettles me. At the very least I can say with some confidence that it excites strong reactions, whatever those reactions may be.

--PolarisDiB