Best movie of this year hands down!

Redundant and unnecessary.

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

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

A previous review on this site states my exact thoughts, but I couldn't not write a review about this. The animation is simple, but impressive. It is light, and nostalgic. Nothing needs to be explained and allows the viewer to interpret the story on its own. I interpret the water rising as a metaphor for getting older, and being unable to go back to previous years (or as in the short film, go back previous floors due to them being flooded). Each floor also gets smaller the higher it goes, because when you are younger, the amount of things or choices in your life seem endless, but once you grow up they are more limited. I don't think the flood was about global warming. I also think that the man represents the lonelines elderly people experience as they grown older. It is harder to make friends and the people you once had around might not be there anymore. They are isolated from the world and forced to live in their homes or nursing homes. The old man had children but they didn't come to visit them. It is the sad truth that lonelines is a big factor to depression and many elderly suffer from it. This is why this short is a real tear jerker, because seeing the elderly man light up remembering his life and the people he loved is something we know we might all experience one day. This was a beautiful film and deserves to be appreciated .

I really enjoyed this animated 12-minute short film. And so did the Academy as they gave it the Oscar over Pixar's possibly most acclaimed short-film "Presto" and a couple others. The difference may be that, while it was possibly not as witty and fast-moving as Pixar's, it had more heart than on organ bank. Its premise is as odd as it's interesting as we see an old man forced to build cubes up his house (that almost looks like a castle at this point) to counter the constantly rising tide. After he does so, he dives down the house and reaches cubes in which he lived before. This is where he is reminded of significant moments of his past, such as his wife or his childhood. The rising-tide idea to make the old man reminisce deep down in the water is nothing short of brilliant and the memory sequences are quite touching and effective especially with the sudden shift back to present and the man being alone in his diving-suit. A truly harmonic score perfectly fits the tone of the movie.Also the people behind this short film are quite interesting. Voice actress Masami Nagasawa is only in her mid-20s, but has already been in over 50 movies and Kunio Kato who wrote and directed this little gem gave one of the most entertaining speeches in recent Oscar history. Domo arigato Mr. Kato! It's a shame he hasn't directed another film in the 5 years since then. I'd be thrilled to see a feature film of his, one where the animation is equally vintage and timeless as in this one. I recommend it a lot and I'm sure I'll appreciate it even more when I approach the main character's age.

Today I watched a wonderful little animation, upon which I accidentally stumbled. La Maison en Petit Cubes managed to make a dent in the otherwise so rigid structure of my daily pattern.The theme here is about keeping a grip on your own life adventure; in this case in a very physical way through the stacking of houses over time. The setting is one where (through climate change probably) the world's water level is continuously increasing. As a result of this, people are forced to build on top of their own houses to 'keep their head above the water'. The beautiful thing depicted here is that one's house tells their life story. The old man, while moving his possessions on floor higher for the umpteenth time, dives down into his own memory. As he floats through the old spaces, their stories start to unfold before his eyes. He sees the development in reverse order, starting with grandchildren and ending with the relationship with the love of his life. On a less joyful note: I couldn't help but seeing similarities with the theme in the Pixar animation 'Up' - which makes me doubt the originality of the latter.Short as this story may be, it gave me a wonderful insight into the nostalgia that spaces of a home can give, and how brilliant it would be if we would live in a new space every so often, thereby preserving the previous one as a ready-made personal history book.

As much an example of the beauty of ever-less-present hand-drawn animation as well as an ode to the slow passage of time, this short film from Japan is an extended metaphor for how things slowly get washed away over time. An old man surviving in his one-room house above the tide drops his pipe into the deep waters that have sunk the foundation of his home up to several stories high. Finding no other pipe suitable as his trusty old one, the man rents some scuba gear and dives down to retrieve it, only to be hit by a flashback of his dead wife. Delving into further rooms, he is hit by memories of the past, all the way back to the foundation of the house itself.The tone is perfect and firm in this animation, both in the drawing style and the music. The film breathes nostalgia and loss, which can also say something about its old school hand-drawn animation and even to the sepia tones of silent film. It's a love story in reverse, too, as the man goes from a place of isolation and loneliness to a full life filled with love and care before your eyes.--PolarisDiB