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Plot Summary
Oscar® Award Winner for Best Animation Short Film 2010. A boy discovers a bizarre looking creature while out collecting bottle tops at the beach. Realising it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but is met with indifference from everyone else, who barely notice its presence, each unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to their day to day lives. For reasons he does not explain, the boy empathises with the creature, and sets out to find a 'place' for it.
Customer Reviews
Amazing
I saw this at the DFT as well. Really makes viewers evaluate the beauty that is all around us and the ugly things that are becoming part of our daily norm. A Genius story, beautifully written.
Conspicuous In Its Absence
This is a charming and thought-provoking animation short from down under. This 16-minute animation short examines an important aspect of the human condition: inspiration, or perhaps we should say, the lack of it. Lost within a world of the mundane, where's society's controls anesthetize the soul, and where everything appears to be labeled, categorized, and ultimately explained, there is no room for an anomaly (anomalous ideas), like The Lost Thing. Intellectual amnesia is so much a part of our modern human society that is it surprising that The Lost Thing is noticed by anyone at all. And yet, it is.
The Lost Thing is that mysterious something which we barely catch 'out of the corner of our eye' . . . that curious moment where a glimmer of light breaks through sameness, a moment when consciousness surfaces for the individual seeker, and which ultimately, can only belong to him, or her.
The lost thing is something only conspicuous in its absence, but it's absence is seldom missed. In searching for the answers as to where this lost thing comes from, where it belongs, and ultimately, what to do with it, the protagonist unconsciously seeks answers to his own existence. Will he break through, or ultimately fall back into the warm ocean of conformity, the hallmark of the post-industrial age? Watch and find out.
It is interesting to note the ultimate home of all Lost Things is marked not by rules and signs, sameness and controls, but by symbols which need interpreting; a world where acts of spontaneous creativity and light thrive, behind the closed doors of our workaday lives. This is a land we only find when we run with those hunches, when we follow those flashes of inspiration . . . when we turn the key that opens — albeit briefly — the portal to the world beyond individual self, where The Lost Thing resides. It is a place to which we seldom venture, and almost never stay . . . a world limited only by the imagination, where the exploration of the creative impulse defines existence. This is consciousness, and it is boundless.
Shorts like The Lost Thing might actually prove an antidote to commercial television.
Beautiful execution of nice ideas
I downloaded this short (the first video from iTunes) after hearing the cleverest plug at the Oscars, and it proved an excellent post-awards treat. This short looks absolutely beautiful. It reminded me of Pynchon, Kafka, Leunig, Jeffrey Smart, Alice in Wonderland and the Unknown Industrial Prisoner. I'd love to see more animations like this one. Well done Australia!
