Frank Film Review

Frank Film is a 1973 Oscar-winning animated short that is very bad.

The directors Frank and Caroline Mouris assembled a bunch of unrelated images and he narrated the film twice, once by explaining the images and the second time relating them to a story. And he put both of those narrations together at once. It is an original technique, but not everything that is original is great and this movie is a fine example of that.

The animation is mediocre and annoying, the images move too fast, way too fast to be recognized, and everything is blurry and dull looking. But the two narrations make the movie impossible to comprehend. I could not hear 80 per cent of it correctly and I do not know how anyone can. It is a stupid, pretentious film that maybe could have been interesting if it wasn’t executed simultaneously, but this way it is one of the worst Oscar-winning animated shorts of all time.

Frank Film did not deserve its Oscar and it’s a travesty that it got it. This original approach to filmmaking is just stupid and it made the movie incomprehensible.