Beyond what I perceive to be the most effective way of transposing the unique aesthetic of Van Gogh's paintings to a three dimensional setting, it's indeed its brilliant use through the stop motion animation to tell such an emotional and touching story that sets this short movie apart everything else.
And it's not only in the fact that the animation itself pays such a peculiar tribute to painting, but how the movie utilises the discipline's particular notions and symbolisms to transpose the story of this man slowly losing his memory.
The way the objects are shown as blurs of paint as they become diluted to him is the most effective manner of showing his unique recessive perspective on things. But it is when his own vision on the people in his life become more and more abstract, general brush strokes without any identity for him or us to distinguish them from each other, that we completely realise the inevitability of his condition as he continuously looses grip of his reality.
He himself keeps losing his own identity, his perception of himself broader and broader, less precise, more primary in form and colour, trying to guard himself in the only activity he can still have without change. And even that... Until, in the end, he watches the last traces, the last brush strokes of his wife, his only constant throughout it all, lingering in his last barely recognisable memories, in a heartbreaking, beautiful and fulfilling ending to a tragic story.
And it's not only in the fact that the animation itself pays such a peculiar tribute to painting, but how the movie utilises the discipline's particular notions and symbolisms to transpose the story of this man slowly losing his memory.
The way the objects are shown as blurs of paint as they become diluted to him is the most effective manner of showing his unique recessive perspective on things. But it is when his own vision on the people in his life become more and more abstract, general brush strokes without any identity for him or us to distinguish them from each other, that we completely realise the inevitability of his condition as he continuously looses grip of his reality.
He himself keeps losing his own identity, his perception of himself broader and broader, less precise, more primary in form and colour, trying to guard himself in the only activity he can still have without change. And even that... Until, in the end, he watches the last traces, the last brush strokes of his wife, his only constant throughout it all, lingering in his last barely recognisable memories, in a heartbreaking, beautiful and fulfilling ending to a tragic story.