User Reviews

Based on some of the works (The preacher, Cabaret and Hell) of Eduard Wiiralt, 'Põorgu' is another impressive piece of animation in black and white I happened to stumble upon via YouTube, consisting of oddly drawn characters who amuse themselves with music, booze and dancing naked ladies. A holy man comes along and tries to intervene by destroying the devil's flute, but eventually all of them seem to end up in hell, as the devil apparently had another flute lying around.

It was a little too dragged out at times for my taste, but I never truly got bored with it. After seeing this, I took a gander at the original pieces via Google, and I honestly must say that those are very strong and complete images all by themselves. I'm glad I watched this one, and it has its own charm for sure, but the paintings are truly superior. Be sure to check them out.

A small 8 out of 10.

"Põrgu" or "Hell" is a Soviet animated black-and-white short film from 1938, so this one has its 35th anniversary next year. The writer and director is Estonian Rein Raamat and this is one of the later efforts from his actually not extremely long career. Well, 16 years is not nothing either I suppose. Today he is in his mid-80s and has not made a new film for a long time. These award-winning 17 minutes are among his most known for sure. This is a film for the workers as it shows an opulent celebration of the rich that oozes nudity, but also decadence and the loss of moral values from start to finish, so you wonder if the hell Raamat is referencing in the title here is really the one at the very end. There is not much of a story or plot for the most part as it is all about the situations, the individual expressions instead of any kind of character development. The question how much you will like this one is closely connected to the subjective approach of how much you like the style and animation here. I myself did not and I don't think the use of color really would have made it any better. Like I said it is really personal opinion. The good thing about this one is that you can watch it no matter where you are from and what languages you speak as there is not one word of spoken dialogue in here from start to finish. The bad news is that this really does not turn it into a better film in my opinion. Watch something else instead.