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Flatland
A Serious and Gifted Filmmaker...
by Dennis Schwartz of Ozus World
A welcome anti-dote to the usual "ignorance is bliss" animations of recent times,
where the CGI is it and the humor is merely cute asides on the pop culture scene.
Indie filmmaker
Ladd P. Ehlinger Jr.
has come up with a most innovative satirical animation based on the 1884 sci-fi novella
by
Edwin Abbott.
It's brazenly original, mucho fun, masterfully designed and smart without being cheeky.
Abbott's supposedly playful book, which takes a poke at England's
rigid Victorian society by his play on geometric forms, has been popular with mathematicians
and computer freaks (which I am neither, and I confess to not even knowing the book existed
before seeing the film). But for a consummate film person like myself, who appreciates quality
in any genre or form, Mr. Ehlinger does a grand job in bringing to life a book that might be
impossible to film and somehow makes it into a spirited avant-garde film that shoots for, maybe,
Michael Snow territory in bringing structural movement to film.
While keeping Abbott's jibes at Victorian arrogance intact the story is
wisely updated to modern times, and for those with even the minimum "real politik"
acumen should get a kick out of how the current worldly machinations are given voice in the animation.
There's a president who blindly wages war under some false pretext of the country being under threat and
there's a senator who sounds like that old liberal warhorse from Massachusetts, whose brother was once the president
in the good ole days. For those tired of the same old stuff, here's some fresh and tasty angles to bounce around in your
head and see if it comes close to finding the essence of cinematic space - the filmmaker's nirvana, if you will.
A Sphere rises from Flatland
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