Balablok

Against a background of pen-and-ink drawings on vellum, crudely drawn cubes on stick legs wander around, tipping their hats to each other. Then a colorful ping-pong ball on legs shows up, and war results.

It's an amusingly conceived and executed cartoon with a MESSAGE. While angels and Pegasi and flying saucers blithely float in the skies above them, these people are intent on hating other people just because they look different. THAT IS A BAD THNG. SOMEONE COULD GET HURT.

True enough. And it's a message worth saying. And the movie is filled with funny voices, which amuses me. But despite its virtues, making THIS VERY VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE WHICH YOU MUST LISTEN TO AND ACT ON into a cartoon seems to me to be an expensive operation. Why not have someone shout it at people instead? I know people who are willing to scream the obvious to people for no money.

The square people all get along nicely and politely with each other until one day they discover a round person. "It's ball-shaped" think they, and so they rather rudely use it as one. Then more round folk turn up and turn the tables. Next thing it's escalated to an army of squares forming the animated equivalent of a Roman turtle against a load of cannonball shaped round ones. Around and round it goes until there is nothing left but splinters and a rather satisfactory sort of hybrid shape that soon adopts exactly the same attitude to different as we've seen all along. This is clearly a metaphor for how human beings tend to treat those whose appearance is different and in many ways it reminded my of a more aggressive "Mr. Men" cartoon. If you're triangle shaped, then you'd best watch out.