Harvie Krumpet

Harvie Krumpet is born in Poland and lives an unlucky life: he has Tourette's, his house burns down, he emigrates to Australia during the war, is struck by lightning, gets cancer and loses a testicle. An entire lifetime is told in twenty-two minutes. The subject is not misfortune but going on anyway. All his life Harvie writes short rules in a notebook, and those rules form the spine of the film; none of them is great wisdom, all of them are advice on staying upright. The form is clay animation shot frame by frame. The palette runs to grey and brown and the figures are deliberately ugly; Adam Elliot kept that style through all his films. It was made in Australia and won the Oscar for best animated short in 2004. Geoffrey Rush narrates, and the dryness of the voice carries all of the humour. Elliot says he writes his films out of real people, and Harvie fits that description. Who it is for: viewers who like adult animation and black humour. Who it is not for: anyone planning to watch with children; the film goes directly at illness, death and sex.