This animated short takes us in to a corporate boardroom where characters representing different body parts are seated around a conference table, including two eye characters, a couple hands and feet. Walking to the front of the room to make a presentation is the boss, a talking foot who points to a chart showing a downward arc representing steadily declining productivity.
The foot informs those gathered that some of them will lose their jobs.
We see an eye character with its belongings packed in a box as it bids farewell. A tongue waves goodbye as it heads for the door.
Later we see two hands picketing, carrying placards with messages urging that their jobs be saved.
A voiceover then provides sobering context to this termination of body parts, informing us that multiple sclerosis “attacks the nervous system, causing body parts to shut down without warning.”
The narrator notes that the disease is most likely to strike people in their 20s and 30s, but we can fight back by contributing to the U.K. MS Society.
Darren Robbie, a.k.a. Chopsy, of Aardman Animations in the U.K.–a lead animator on the feature film Chicken Run–directed this 35-second PSA which has gone viral and hopes to raise awareness of, and cash to combat, a much misunderstood and potentially devastating disease. The client-direct PSA–with Chopsy and Terry Brain serving as animators–was launched during MS Week (5/23-29).
Review: Director Pablo Larrain’s “Maria” Starring Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie glides through the final days of Maria Callas' short life in Pablo Larraín's "Maria," a dramatic, evocative elegy to the famed soprano. It's an affair that's at turns melancholy, biting and grandly theatrical, an aria for a once in a generation star.
Reality is of little consequence on the stage and in "Maria." It's all about the raw feeling, which serves the movie well, more dream than history lesson about La Callas. Early on, she pops some Mandrax and tells her devoted butler Ferruccio (a simply wonderful Pierfrancesco Favino) that a television crew is on the way. Are they real, he wonders.
"As of this morning, what is real and what is not real is my business," she says calmly and definitively, making a feast out of Steven Knight's sharp script. It's one of many great lines and moments for Jolie, whose intensity and resolve belie her fragile appearance. And it's a signal to the audience as well: Don't fret about dull facts or that Jolie doesn't really resemble Callas all that much. This is a biopic as opera — an emotional journey fitting of the great diva, full of flair, beauty, betrayal, revelations and sorrow.
In "Maria," we are the companion to a protagonist with an ever-loosening grip on reality, walking with her through Paris, and her life, for one week in September 1977.
The images from cinematographer Ed Lachman, playfully shifting in form and style, take us on a scattershot journey through her triumphs on stage, her scandalous romance with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) and her traumatic youth. In the present, at age 53, she sleeps till midday, drinks the minimal calories she ingests, goes to restaurants where the waiters know her name looking for adulation and has visions of performances staged just for... Read More