Gordon-11
This animated short film tells the story of two street musicians, who engage in a spectacular battle of skills to try to win a child's gold coin.The film is fun to watch, as the two musicians do everything they can and more to win the coin. Yet, the outcome of the battle is perhaps predictable, but what happens after that is not what I can predict. It is an interesting tale with a twist at the end.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
This is a 5-minute animated short film from Pixar that was also nominated for an Oscar, but lost to the entry with the longest runtime that year. The story is pretty simple. We do not have one one man band in this film, no, we have two. They are fighting for a little girl's affection, or I should probably say golden coin. Who's gonna prevail? Find out for yourself. The animation is pretty good (obviously a given with Pixar), quite a decent watch with the costumes etc. as well and the ending is funny too. Other than that that (and the priceless look on the girl's face when her coin is lost), I really only found it mediocre. But it's not bad either, so certainly worth a watch for animation lovers. Oh and for music lovers, for the tunes in here are pretty nice. But the music also had to be good as all the focus is on this aspect with no people talking. By the way, one of the writer/director duo won an Academy Award for "Brave" not too long ago and the other is enjoying a pretty prolific career too. You can see glimpses of their talent in this short movie. Recommended.
sashank_kini-1
Pixar's one man band get cacophonous when two buskers vie to get a gold coin from a little girl. The short story starts with an avuncular busker playing simple music with his trumpet, when he sees that a little girl is about to drop her coin in the fountain, perhaps for a wish. But he manages to lure her with his music and immediately pushes his bowl so that the coin goes into his pocket. Just when the girl reaches to drop the coin into the bowl, another violinist begins to play his instrument. This man is lanky and he plays his instrument mellifluously.The war begins and the girl gets confused as both the buskers get more and more competitive. The ending is unexpected, and I'm glad Pixar didn't go for an emotional ending. The animation is quite vibrant and detailed for a short film and the humor is subtle. My rating: 7/10
tedg
Pixar, at least the preDisney Pixar, uses shorts as experiments. They've used them for new volume computation routines. Remember the birds squooshed together on a telephone line? Remember "Boundin'" which investigated the use of quickly changing space? This one is an amusement of course, they all are. But its reason to be what it is, is the opportunity to explore how characters define space. A problem with the type of 3D animation Pixar does is that the characters become harder. Their skin becomes more of an edge that separates them from their context. Human actors have ways around this. Digital puppets don't have this same possibility.But they have others, and one of those is to be compound beings. But how to use this so the characters "read" well is unknown. So we have this experiment. As with all Pixar projects, its a triumph. Its more amazing when you know the problem they were solving.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
AD
