'The Lost Thing (2010),' winner of the 2011 Oscar for Best Animated Short, is narrated by Australian comedian and musician Tim Minchin, who I thought an odd choice. The film unfolds like a storybook, so I had envisioned a warm fatherly narrating voice (we can blame Adam Elliot for putting Geoffrey Rush into my head), but Minchin's whiny, apathetic Aussie drawl is completely at odds. But it works. The storyteller is, in fact, a first-person narrator, so it does make sense that he would sound like an ordinary bloke.
A young man, while scouring the beach for bottle caps, comes across a bizarre mechanical beast: part industrial boiler, part crab, part octopus (if you can imagine that). The man can't identify this odd creature, but nevertheless gets the feeling that it is lost. He takes it home, where the extraordinary creature is treated with relative apathy by friends and family, so caught up are they in their own dreary lives. The "lost thing" is eventually returned to its home, a vibrant land of mechanical gizmos living in perfect harmony.
Co-directors Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan forge a stiflingly Orwellian atmosphere, complete with oppressive shadows, dim lighting, skyscrapers of filing cabinets and administrative forms. The setting is a drab version of Melbourne (as suggested by the trams), set in a nostalgic portmanteau of industrial past and post-apocalyptic future. The graphics are computer-generated, and yet they have all the character and warmth of traditional animation or claymation.
A young man, while scouring the beach for bottle caps, comes across a bizarre mechanical beast: part industrial boiler, part crab, part octopus (if you can imagine that). The man can't identify this odd creature, but nevertheless gets the feeling that it is lost. He takes it home, where the extraordinary creature is treated with relative apathy by friends and family, so caught up are they in their own dreary lives. The "lost thing" is eventually returned to its home, a vibrant land of mechanical gizmos living in perfect harmony.
Co-directors Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan forge a stiflingly Orwellian atmosphere, complete with oppressive shadows, dim lighting, skyscrapers of filing cabinets and administrative forms. The setting is a drab version of Melbourne (as suggested by the trams), set in a nostalgic portmanteau of industrial past and post-apocalyptic future. The graphics are computer-generated, and yet they have all the character and warmth of traditional animation or claymation.