The Three Sisters from Bel-Air (2003)

Director: Sylvain Chomet
Country: France
Length: 78 minutes
Genre: Animation, Adventure

This is a French animated film about an elderly lady, Madame Souza who journeys through France searching for her kidnapped grandson, Champion. Along her journey she meets three sisters that were once famous performers and are now old, tired and forgotten.

The film has very, very little dialogue (I have been told there's 10 spoken words), while the dialogue is spoken in French and there are no subtitles, it is not at all necessary to understand what is said in order to know what the movie is about or what's going on.

What makes this film so great, aside from the retro-styled animation, is the mind-bottling soundtrack. Most of the music is performed using miscellaneous items you would find in your home (vacuum cleaners, newspapers, pots and pans) and bicycle rims or other old junk.

This is a fantastic film and one of my favorites. I strongly recommend it to anyone who's a fan of Animation or Foreign films.

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Старик и море [The Old Man and the Sea] (1999)

Director: Александр Петров (Aleksandr Petrov)
Runtime: 20 minutes
Language: English
Genre: Animation, Adventure

Based on the novella written by author Earnest Hemingway, this Russian short film features beautiful finger painted pastel oil paintings on glass animation by Aleksandr Petrov, the pioneer of the style. This film is a beautiful work of art for the two years of painstaking effort put in to the making of the animation. But the film isn't just visually impressive, Petrov also does a fantastic job of portraying the character's inner thoughts and feelings. There's one scene where the old man dozed off, and had a dream he and the marlin were brothers swimming together through the sky.

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I Am So Proud of You (2008)

Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Country: United States
Length: 22 minutes
Genre: Animation, Black Comedy, Surrealism, Drama

The sequel to Everything Will Be Ok, I Am So Proud of You shows Bill's childhood and his eventual death. Don Hertzfeldt does just as fantastic of a job making the viewer laugh at the most disturbing events as he did in the previous short. The genius of his shorts is that not only are they hilarious but they can also affect you on a deep emotional level.

Don continues his innovative technique here as he introduced in the previous installment in the series of using multiple frames at a same time, sometimes having a frame for the drawn stick figures and another for film on screen at the same time.

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Everything Will Be OK (2006)

Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Country: United States
Length: 17 minutes
Genre: Animation, Black Comedy, Surrealism, Drama

This animated short is about a man named Bill who's life, or lack thereof, is humorously depicted throughout the film. As it goes on Bill steadily loses his mind, probably due to some sort of mental illness like schizophrenia. Don Hertzfeldt has a unique style of using stick figure drawings and splitting the screen up in to multiple windows. The end result is a very compelling and humorous short film that stays interesting throughout its entirety.

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