23 Degrees, 5 Minutes (2011)

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

23 Degrees, 5 Minutes is directed by and co-written by Darragh O'Connell, a two time Oscar nominee for animated shorts.It is a CGI rendered animation short featuring the voices of John Hurt as the numbers obsessed Mathematical Professor Orit and Stuart Townsend as his student Babbage.The professor is inspired to seek out the solution for the Unified Theory, the sought after formula that may explain the essence of life. However time is short and he decides to go to the north pole which is at an angle of 23 degrees and 5 minutes.Some years later Babbage now older decides to find out what happened to the professor.This is an intriguing animation which you believe will be a quest for numbers but is destined to be more festive themed. The CGI is quite good with parts very nice detailed.

This is a good looking short film. It has decent computer animation for what it is and the voice cast benefits from having Stuart Townsend and John Hurt in the two lead roles. It starts out in the icy wilderness of the Arctic and then jumps back to the a young man interacting with his math's professor. A series of interconnected events around the numbers 23 and 5 set the professor off on a mission to explore the world of numbers for the mythical formula which will link and explain everything.I have seen many films (features and shorts) which use the idea of mysterious numbers and the hunt for something inside them and the one common thread among them tends to be that they underwhelm. So it is with this one. The high production values do not extend to the actual material and what may have been an interesting idea is really given short service on the way to an ending that really does nothing of any note other than be disappointing. The build-up through the maths is unconvincing and the film doesn't seem interested in anything other than getting through it – the 'hand me that book, ah yes here it is…' line was the perfect summary of the film since it occurred so quickly without any time for the character to actually find a page far less anything else – and this was typical of the film racing through material it wasn't interested in.Getting to the end of the film I can see why it felt like that, because the end is both predictable but yet disappointingly random in terms of how it connects to the rest of the film. The voice actors give it a sense of quality that the animation backs up in terms of being polished, but not in terms of personality or detail – yes it works but it is stiff, mass produced and it adds to the feeling of there being no heart to the film. It plays with ideas but for all the gloss on the production, it offers nothing in the substance to engage and yet, as disinterested as I was, the ending still managed to draw an emotional reaction from me – just not a good one.

"23 Degrees, 5 Minutes" was written and directed by Darragh O'Connell--the same guy who produced two Oscar-nominated shorts--"Give Up Yer Aul Sins" and "Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty" (which I adore because the short is so wickedly funny). John Hurt and Stuart Townsend provide the voices (quite excellently I might add) for the characters. This short from Brown Bag Films is rendered using CGI--and very nice computer animation at that.The story is about a very strange and very obsessed professor. He has decided to conquer the so-called unified theory--a mathematical formula which will explain life, the universe and everything (and no, it is NOT 42). This weird obsession takes him to the North Pole--and some time after his disappearance, one of his old students goes there in search of the man or his remains. What happens next? See the film and find out. While I did guess the ending, it was sweet and cleverly made from start to finish.