A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

The Evaluation System Reviews by Title Reviews by Date

Reviews from Video Reviews of the Classics Personal Background

Title: Meme les Pigeons vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons go to Heaven)

Date Viewed: 2/18/08

Details:

Directors: Samuel Torneux

Executive producer: Vanesse Simon

Score: +

The Review: CGI (with a lot of the flavor of hand-drawn cels); comedy (indeed quite clever). What starts as a race between an eavesdropping, not entirely on the up-and-up priest and one other, turns into a manic sales pitch. The priest is trying to sell a peasant a gadget guaranteed to take him to heaven.

French. This is one of this year's (2008) five Oscar-nominated animated shorts, along with Moya Lyubov, Madame Tutli-Putli, I Met the Walrus, Peter and the Wolf, all available to the general public via digital video release into selected theatres (for the third year) from Magnolia. The highlights for me were My Love for artwork and Peter and the Wolf for characterization, but in general, this year's collection didn't seem to click quite so well as in previous years. Yes, each has its own distinctive signature quirk, animation style, and twist on the expected storyline -- it's easy to see why this broad representation was nominated. But it's hard to know what else was in the running through the year, and there's nothing that sticks out as prominently as my memories of The Passenger (from 2007), or especially 9 (from 2006). Maybe it's because there was no Pixar entry? The collection was reasonably good, overall, and an entertaining mix.

(22-Feb-08)

Back to the chronological list of reviews