"Mr Hublot" is an animated short film that runs for 10 minutes roughly and was basically a one-man project by Laurent Witz with a little help from Alexandre Espigares. The title character is a man who lives pretty isolated from society in his apartment and his only contact to the outside world is looking out of his window. One day, he sees a puppy and after giving it some thought, he takes it in. The puppy is as mechanized and robotized as everything else in this world. I have to say I found the main character fairly uninteresting and the only smile they got from me was when I saw what a gigantic dog the puppy turned into. The ending was okay as well. Still I did not find anything about this particularly memorable. The animation is okay, obviously lots of attention to detail with all the gadgets in here, and the story isn't bad either and the music is okay too. Yet I am surprised this won an Academy Award. It is definitely not that good. I am not the greatest fan of Pixar's Mickey Mouse revival or "Romm on the Broom" either, but still I believe these two are superior to "Mr Hublot". (I haven't seen the other two nominees yet.) I guess the sentimentality, especially the ending, was decisive for the voters. For me, it's just a pretty poor man's version of "The Lost Thing". Not recommended and this has not made me hoping for more films in the future by Witz.
Review of Mr Hublot
