Gloria Victoria (2013)

Gloria Victoria Review

Gloria Victoria is a 2013 animated short film directed by Theodore Ushev. It’s a an artistic experiment that mostly works.

This film tracks conflicts and wars throughout human history while accompanied by artistic animation and classical music. The result is six minutes of art that obviously isn’t particularly engaging, but it is effective in eliciting anti-war sentiment. I just wished that the imagery employed here was more interesting and direct as too often it was overly ambiguous or even darkly lit as was the case with the first two minutes.

Gloria Victoria still works because it benefits strongly from the iconic Shostakovich music. That piece was so electric and so immediately disturbing that it perfectly fitted the subject of the short. The animation mixes surrealism and cubism, especially focusing on the latter in the second half that is full of those geometric shapes that represent that movement.

Gloria Victoria doesn’t fully work and it’s overly ambiguous, but the cubist and surrealist style in its animation was gorgeous and the Shostakovich music was a great fit for its imagery of war and destruction.

My Rating – 3.8