I have always kept an eye on short animated films. They help me in saving some time as I try to engage in this reviewing thing while having a job and other aspects of living. Somehow, I came across this little animated film, and to my surprise, it won an Oscar. This would be my second review involving an Oscar winning project right after has the short documentary The White Helmets. This is especially so because it was only some random short that got an out of all things Academy Award but still, I could not understand the meaning of it still.
The House of Small Cubes is a story of an elderly man living in a high-rise building. He inhabits an over flooded town where most structures and human beings are submerged as well. The elderly man’s daily routine includes sitting indoors, smoking a pipe and fishing through a hatch that lowers to the water situated underneath the huge apartment. One day, he accidentally drops his pipe through the fishing hatch and as he is attempting to fish it out from the water that was rising and flooding his house, he decides to put on the scuba gear. Consequently, what he undergoes is an unanticipated journey back into his past, as flashbacks re-emerge upon retrieving mementos of his previous years that have been underwater.
For its Japanese provenance, I guess this short film can be classified as anime. But in all honesty, this has got to be the least anime thing that I’ve ever watched. The character design is very American and the scenery is not what you would expect from the country, let alone the continent. I would have had no second thoughts if you had said that The House of Small Cubes was made in France or Belgium. Not that the animation was bad. It’s just that the visuals are wow. The rest of the scenes are painted in an antique sepia style while the underwater shots are painted an illimitable range of silver seas. The color elicits reminiscence and pokes forlornness in this water-clogged city. There is so much motion and yet so many harsh surfaces that mesh very well with this animated short. Like Rain Town that came after this one, there is no language focus, and so the plot mainly centers on the deeds of the protagonist as he struggles to get back his pipe that sinks further and further. It was a delight to watch his slow life as a recall of an ordinary man who keeps looking at very trivial things. One such case is a couch that is inside the house but submerged under the water.
He then imagines himself as a child, with a camera in the midst of a family reunion and taking photographs with grandchildren. This evolves into a more disturbing scene as he notices a bed on level just one up. The memory that comes up is of actually cradling his own dying wife. Man, that just got me in the feels once that and other memories come into play as he goes down towards what we would regard as the floor of the ocean in his neighborhood. This was really a fantastic approach to viewing the last image of the memories and especially how the memories about the man within the context of his life as a whole. You may want your tissues for that.
Even though Small Cubes was a very captivating watch, I could not overlook some shortcomings. There was no reason given as to how the whole city got water-logged. There is no doubt that the destruction would be horrendous, and one would imagine from the flashbacks that many more people occupied this place before the flood because one can see twelve houses standing on dry land many years before the movie! Was it climate change? Was it a coastal town with an awful dam that had a lot of leaks? Was it aliens? And I don’t know, and I rather wish this was something they would have been able to support with evidence on how the town became submerged in the first place. I also pondered what became of the rest of his family other than his deceased wife. I guess that they all went to the hills or a different town away from the water damage caused here, but that’s only a wild guess though.
The House of Small Cubes was a well-thought of short film that I had never even heard of. It was incredible to see the creativity in the house as an asset of the old man particularly in the way he embraced this waterlogged Tartaros. The light acoustic music was nice as it was soothing and did not draw too much attention on the activities in this film. There a couple of gaps in the storyline, but as far as this film is concerned, the good all but outweigh the bad. You will find this touching and moving as you will see. Looking forward to watching more of Kunio Kato’s works in order to understand whether his entire filmography is as qualitative as this one. Of course, Small Cubes is not going to be of interest for those who are in the craving of Shonen Jump fights, moe, Shojo or any other otaku pleasures. This should be viewed by people who have open minds as well as those that appreciate animation as art.
Watch The House of Small Cubes on Kimcartoon
