wall17

The title is pretty much my entire review, and I could go on at length, but will do so only because IMDB now requires a certain minimum number of characters for reviews.

If you like the effect of sniffing glue and licking a 9 volt battery while headphones at maximum volume are duct taped to your had, by all means, this is the film for you.

If you prefer your Godzilla movies -- as I do -- without smirking, ridiculous attempts to manipulate the audience, or mysterious tribes and giant monkeys somehow knowing American Sign Language, pass. If you prefer your Godzilla movies, like I do, with interesting monster fights and not weird clearly CGI screeching motivationless slap fights, pass. If you would like Godzilla not to be wandering around aimlessly for no apparent reason, leaping whole time zones in a matter of seconds, pass.

Otherwise it's great!

Take the drawing style of Ed Gorey, the sensibility of doom of Abner Dean, and the Sysyiphean zeitgeist of, oh, a filmmaker working in Communist-era Eastern Europe, and you'll have an approximate idea of the feel of Ice Merchants.

I'd warn you that any description of the plot would be full of spoilers, but the IMDB tagline itself is full of spoilers! My advice is to watch this cold, without any particular description of the plot, for best effect. You'll get a very deftly done, real sense of jeopardy for the characters, as well as experiencing the strangeness of the whole premise as one is meant to.

It's a parable for loss and recovery, grief and holding on to love, but wordless and without engaging in sentimentality. There's a reasonably nice revelation with a laugh out loud moment as we see something decidedly inexplicable and seemingly extraneous come in at the end. It's really quite touching, and again, if I explained the plot even a little bit, you'd likely lose the emotional sense that this film very adeptly creates.

This was not my first choice among the Oscar nominees for best short animation (we saw them all at one sitting) but it's a credible runner-up. If you're not literally on the edge of your seat watching this, I'd be surprised.

So take "The Matrix", "The Office", Wallace and Gromit, a couple of B-grade Twilight Zone episodes, and add a very healthy dose of the classic Loony Tunes "Duck Amuck", mix them in a blender, and you will get something close to "An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake..."

I will say from the outset that there were several laugh out loud moments here, as the existential crisis of an office worker who (no spoilers, it's in the title) has reason to believe he's not actually real develops. It's an enjoyable little piece of pulling back the curtain to see how the Wizard of Oz operates, with what I'd normally say is a fun and intriguing premise.

That's where this left me a bit flat (no aspersions on our more two-dimensionally oriented animators) however. The ground here, so well sowed by PK Dick, has been amply harvested in recent years by "Vanilla Sky", "Inception", and a host of others littered across streaming outlets. There's no big reveal here, as you know from the first moment what the character eventually learns. Then there's no release to the tension, as in the end everything is as the viewer sees it to be from frame 1 (I know this because the frames are all counted off in the corner of the screen - a shoutout to Godard's "Le Mepris", perhaps? At least among many other films-within-films premises.)

So we're left with a feeling of unease, sadness, and no real insights into the dilemma our little office drone has. It's a cute little film but needed just a touch more story to complete it.