Kirpianuscus An impressive short animation. from atmosphere to each detail. for the impecable story . and for the great level of realism. a film about delicate manner to discover the near reality. soft, precise, using a familiar warning. proposing a small world , so obvious ignored. and an old fashion story. in a laboratory. in the hunt for a bag.

TxMike This is the animated story of a rather ordinary big city rat, struggling to survive. Getting food is a big part of that effort.There is an almost empty bag of cheese puffs, floating in the breeze, that catches the rat's attention. He sees the uneaten puff, and is attracted to it. The bag gets closer to a rotating roof ventilator, and the rat gets closer. Then, the bag slips through, and somehow the rat slips through also.What transpires after that is the meat of the story. The city rat finds himself in a strange, sterile world, of white rats and laboratory robots. Each rat has a bar code attached. It is clearly some type of experimental laboratory, where the rats are administered various substances and their performance measured.You have to watch the film to see what happens, it is very well animated, but havoc ensues. All the white rats are freed temporarily, and the city rat sees the one he has fallen in love with. While not everything is resolved to the satisfaction of the two rats, it is an interesting story, well-told in very nice animation.This is part of a collection on DVD, "A Collection of 2006 Academy Award Nominated Short Films" from my local library.

valerie_lp I'm not an animation junkie, and spent this weekend in the theatre watching last year's Oscar shorts (live-action and animated) because it was free and I was bored. I believe ORS didn't even make it to the Oscars, though it was shortlisted. But it was, to me anyway, clearly the best thing in the animation category, and possibly of them all. It looks great--not too derivative, not too abstract or "cartoony," and definitely NOT like CGI. The surfaces are so real (fur, metal, glass) you feel like you can touch them, the contrasts between dark and light are expertly used, and the scene where the Cheeto is crushed in slow motion is simply beautiful. The music was perfectly suited to the action, almost another character in itself. And on top of it all, it has fast-paced suspense and a touching love story, with the right ending for a change (something far too many films featuring humans fail at). This film has stayed with me long after many of the others I saw that night have faded. I'm sure sure I'll buy it off iTunes...but I have to wait a bit, since it affected me so much I'm not sure I'm ready to watch it again yet!

Polaris_DiB This animation is very beautiful, but very weird. It's a strange mix of the animal and the anthropomorphic, and the recognizable and the alien. A hungry rat follows a bag of cheetos into a ventilation shaft, which gives away to an animal testing facility where he meets a white female rat, and the two fall in love. They manage to have some brief moments together before a failed escape keeps them permanently apart, in a touching moment of loss.What's the testing facility for? We don't know. Are the white rats genetically engineered? They may be. The story is told through the perspective of the hero rat, so narrative answers like these aren't given. Yet the strange and alien world the rat finds himself in seems so utterly familiar within its alienation, partly because of its science fiction tropes and partly because the rats aren't just rats, they do have vestiges of anthropomorphic characterizations (which become more and more recognizable as the short goes on).This alien/familiar dichotomy creates both wonder and fear, which is aided by the dark film noir quality of the outside of the facility and the washed-out white quality of the inside. No space really seems comfortable in this animation, which makes it terribly cynical. However, the ballet-quality exposition of the bag and the moment when the rats are together give it just enough hope for the audience to really relate to this rat's strange/familiar adventure, which makes the ending just that much more powerful. I don't know what it means, but I can't shake it from me.--PolarisDiB