Country Hungary

Golden Bird (1987)

Golden Bird is a small, beautifully judged piece that does a surprising amount in seven minutes. The work of Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz, it is a striking black-and-white line drawing brought to life, and I liked it a great deal. Three and a half stars for a short that is as clever in its ideas as it is in its craft.

For much of its length the film lives in monochrome, its rooms and spaces shaded by fine lines gathering in the corners, all hand-drawn precision and restraint. Then, halfway through, colour arrives, injected through the form of a window looking out onto a lake, and the effect is lovely: vivid, almost felt-tip-bright hues bursting into a world that has been grey until now. It is a simple device used to real emotional effect.

I read it as a study of confinement, a meditation on feeling trapped, something close to claustrophobia, with that window of colour standing in for a longed-for elsewhere. And the film has a wonderful final flourish. Towards the end, the cramped square of the frame itself seems to crumble away, giving the illusion that the piece is breaking free of its own confines, form and theme collapsing into one another in a genuinely inspired moment.

Three and a half stars. Golden Bird is a compact, artful and quietly moving little film that understands exactly what animation can do that nothing else can. It accomplishes more in seven minutes than plenty of features manage in two hours.

Reviewed as part of the Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival's Politics of the Imagination programme.

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Golden Bird (1987)

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American Beauty (1999)

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

The Babadook (2014)

The Peanuts Movie (2015)

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