This short won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Subject. There will be spoilers ahead:
Saul Bass is best known for his inventive and memorable opening and closing credit sequences for films such as Anatomy of a Murder, Psycho, Vertigo and Around the World In Eighty Days. This is a short film using a mix of animation and live action which proves both amusing and thought-provoking.
It starts with a five minute animated sequence starting with prehistoric hunters and traveling on up through time to the present (1968). It references major events/eras such as the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, the various scientific discoveries (and the orthodoxy's attempts to squelch them) figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Lincoln, the Wright Brothers and so on. These are occasionally out of sequence. This segment is almost worth the price of admission itself.
The varied segments are all introduced, as the film itself is begun: a hand writing with a pencil puts down a heading, much as you would find on an outline. While the sections are mostly unconnected, there are a couple which are directly related. Most of these are best viewed without too much information, so I'll avoid spoiling them here. Portions of this are essentially blackout comedy sketches.
Ultimately, the whole seemingly unrelated short more or less comes together with the last part, which asks the question, "Why does man create?", to which the answer is rather obvious.
This short deserves to be much more widely available and better known. Most highly recommended.
Saul Bass is best known for his inventive and memorable opening and closing credit sequences for films such as Anatomy of a Murder, Psycho, Vertigo and Around the World In Eighty Days. This is a short film using a mix of animation and live action which proves both amusing and thought-provoking.
It starts with a five minute animated sequence starting with prehistoric hunters and traveling on up through time to the present (1968). It references major events/eras such as the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, the various scientific discoveries (and the orthodoxy's attempts to squelch them) figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Lincoln, the Wright Brothers and so on. These are occasionally out of sequence. This segment is almost worth the price of admission itself.
The varied segments are all introduced, as the film itself is begun: a hand writing with a pencil puts down a heading, much as you would find on an outline. While the sections are mostly unconnected, there are a couple which are directly related. Most of these are best viewed without too much information, so I'll avoid spoiling them here. Portions of this are essentially blackout comedy sketches.
Ultimately, the whole seemingly unrelated short more or less comes together with the last part, which asks the question, "Why does man create?", to which the answer is rather obvious.
This short deserves to be much more widely available and better known. Most highly recommended.