The House of Small Cubes

A big man in the late part of his life, lives on the top floor of a multi-story house. He actually fishes through a trap door because water has risen so high that his cube is all that is above it. He drops his pipe and goes down in the water to find it. What he finds on the way down are emanations of his life and loves, wife, children, friends. When he tries to grasp the or touch them they disappear. These lower levels are gone forever, never to be reclaimed. But this is what we all face, if we are lucky. Wonderful memories of times we were happy or times we are sad or times we were scared. The music is so pretty and adds a soft touch to the delicate film.

The House of Small Cubes felt a bit familiar, like I might've seen it before in either high school or during some university course, but I don't know for sure. It could just be that the visuals and colors reminded me of The City of Lost Children, and that felt familiar. But for a while, this short film also feels like it could be about forgetting things with age, so that's a bit sobering to not know if I remembered the whole thing or not.

But probably not. I think it's more about grief, and maybe memory but not so much in the sense of losing it, even if the voiceless and solitary protagonist is old. Or it could be an apocalyptic thing. The animation is visually pleasing but there's also something a bit unsettling about it all, with the isolation, and the fact that other people only appear in memories.

Maybe it'll stick with me for good this time, supposing I had seen it before some years ago. I'm not in love with the short, and can't shake the feeling that it was missing a little something that might've made it great, but there's still enough here to appreciate that watching it felt worthwhile.

A previous review on this site states my exact thoughts, but I couldn't not write a review about this. The animation is simple, but impressive. It is light, and nostalgic. Nothing needs to be explained and allows the viewer to interpret the story on its own.

I interpret the water rising as a metaphor for getting older, and being unable to go back to previous years (or as in the short film, go back previous floors due to them being flooded). Each floor also gets smaller the higher it goes, because when you are younger, the amount of things or choices in your life seem endless, but once you grow up they are more limited. I don't think the flood was about global warming.

I also think that the man represents the lonelines elderly people experience as they grown older. It is harder to make friends and the people you once had around might not be there anymore. They are isolated from the world and forced to live in their homes or nursing homes. The old man had children but they didn't come to visit them. It is the sad truth that lonelines is a big factor to depression and many elderly suffer from it.

This is why this short is a real tear jerker, because seeing the elderly man light up remembering his life and the people he loved is something we know we might all experience one day.

This was a beautiful film and deserves to be appreciated .

I don't know why at least two people in other comments write about „flood caused (probably) by global warming".

To me, the flood is purely metaphorical. It's the time that is cruel and forces us to move on, to the next stage of our lives even if we don't want to, because we feel happy where we are, even if we maybe would like to stay there a little bit longer. But we cannot. The rising water forces us to go on. There's no exception.

The old man from the movie travels back in time to watch again the memories of his life but also, as we all know, he becomes aware all those moments are absolutely gone. It's not possible to live underwater – we can only submerge for a moment to have a look at what is there that is all we can do.

This is a movie about life, about being old and lonely, NOT about the global warming nonsense.

Its clear in the animation that the point of the story isn't the fact that the city is flooding. In my view, the water represents the past, what is flooded is buried in memory. As the old man ages he continues to build upwards to escape the water, which in that sense, represents life. When he drops the pipe, he goes into the water after it. By doing so, he has delved into the past. His pipe represents a sentimental emotion, and by going after it, relives his life from childhood into his present elderly state. The ending will represent, or at least it did to me, the fact that experiencing those emotions again has made him miss his (apparently) deceased wife, and is lonely. His child has reached adulthood and started a life of her own, so what now does he have left? To continue building (living) until he reaches the limit, and ultimately death, which is when there is no higher he can build up.