One Rat short (2006)

Excellent but underrated film

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

An impressive short animation. from atmosphere to each detail. for the impecable story . and for the great level of realism. a film about delicate manner to discover the near reality. soft, precise, using a familiar warning. proposing a small world , so obvious ignored. and an old fashion story. in a laboratory. in the hunt for a bag.

This is the animated story of a rather ordinary big city rat, struggling to survive. Getting food is a big part of that effort.There is an almost empty bag of cheese puffs, floating in the breeze, that catches the rat's attention. He sees the uneaten puff, and is attracted to it. The bag gets closer to a rotating roof ventilator, and the rat gets closer. Then, the bag slips through, and somehow the rat slips through also.What transpires after that is the meat of the story. The city rat finds himself in a strange, sterile world, of white rats and laboratory robots. Each rat has a bar code attached. It is clearly some type of experimental laboratory, where the rats are administered various substances and their performance measured.You have to watch the film to see what happens, it is very well animated, but havoc ensues. All the white rats are freed temporarily, and the city rat sees the one he has fallen in love with. While not everything is resolved to the satisfaction of the two rats, it is an interesting story, well-told in very nice animation.This is part of a collection on DVD, "A Collection of 2006 Academy Award Nominated Short Films" from my local library.

I absolutely loved this animation when I first saw it at Siggraph 2006. Though I could easily consider it an animated work of art based on the visual aspects of it alone, the one thing I loved most about it was that the animation studio took a divergent path in telling a story that was more or less tragic, something which is normally left to Japanese animators. I think the American audience is still on the fence about considering animation as a valid medium of expression but hopefully films such as this might help pave the way. I also found it amazing that while the style was highly realistic both in appearance and behavior, the artists where able to successfully communicate emotion through simple gestures and small changes of expression. You never forget they are rats, but you given just enough visual cues to become involved without things resulting to typical disneyesque behavior. I think that's the reason that the film has garnered so much attention. I really hope to see more from this studio since they seem to have a pool of great talent across the board. As to though who still ask how anyone can get emotionally evolved with a story about rats, I think Roger Ebert said it best in his review of Grave of the Fireflies; "This film proves, if it needs proving, that animation produces emotional effects not by reproducing reality, but by heightening and simplifying it, so that many of the sequences are about ideas, not experiences."

I'm not an animation junkie, and spent this weekend in the theatre watching last year's Oscar shorts (live-action and animated) because it was free and I was bored. I believe ORS didn't even make it to the Oscars, though it was shortlisted. But it was, to me anyway, clearly the best thing in the animation category, and possibly of them all. It looks great--not too derivative, not too abstract or "cartoony," and definitely NOT like CGI. The surfaces are so real (fur, metal, glass) you feel like you can touch them, the contrasts between dark and light are expertly used, and the scene where the Cheeto is crushed in slow motion is simply beautiful. The music was perfectly suited to the action, almost another character in itself. And on top of it all, it has fast-paced suspense and a touching love story, with the right ending for a change (something far too many films featuring humans fail at). This film has stayed with me long after many of the others I saw that night have faded. I'm sure sure I'll buy it off iTunes...but I have to wait a bit, since it affected me so much I'm not sure I'm ready to watch it again yet!