La Maison en Petits Cubes

The water keeps rising. An old man goes on living by adding another storey to his house, which is now a tower of cubes stacked on top of one another. One day he drops his pipe into the water, puts on a diving suit and goes down. Each floor is a period: his children, his wife, his youth, their first meeting. The subject is not climate but memory. Going down means going back, and on every floor he lives a loss again. In twelve minutes there is not a single line of dialogue. The form has the texture of watercolour, soft lines and warm colour. The shaky edges of the drawing are left in deliberately; there is no machine smoothness. Kunio Kato directed it. It won the Oscar for best animated short in 2009. Kato's acceptance speech was short because of his limited English and he ended it by thanking his pencil, a line that became one of the most remembered moments of that ceremony. Masami Nagasawa narrates the Japanese version. Who it is for: viewers who like wordless animation and stories built on old age. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for incident; the film is entirely an act of remembering backwards and runs twelve minutes.