The Bigger Picture (2014)
The Bigger Picture Review
The Bigger Picture is a 2014 British animated short film that was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. It’s a very strong film.
The film is about two sons who are ambivalent about taking care of their aging mother. Although I’ve experienced what these brothers were going through quite recently myself, I did not quite get emotional watching this movie that is mostly a bit too cold for its own sake. With that being said, it’s a very good movie that depicts the differences in opinion when it comes to family trauma and how you should tackle it while clearly distinguishing between the two brothers.
The highlight is the animation that features 2D painted life-size puppetry. Needless to say, it’s unlike anything else we’ve seen before or after this movie. It’s an incredible combination of hand-drawn and stop-motion techniques that really worked and made the short wildly inventive and artistic. The technical aspects were excellent here and so was the film’s very effective ending.
