Synopsis
Driving along the motorway, Will loses his sense of scale. As his crippling drug addiction deepens, he struggles to unpick the sequence of events that led to his predicament, before he's lost forever.
Scale
2022 Directed by Joseph Pierce
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Executive Producer
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Original Language
Spoken Languages
Alternative Title
L'échelle
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Premiere
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France
Releases by Country
France
22 May 2022
- Premiere
Popular reviews
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Abstraction is a counterintuitively efficient medium to examine something as intrinsically hallucinatory as a morphine addiction, letting moments of symbolism bleed into each other and form a generalised picture of mental health. At its best, Scale excels at this, but occasionally falls into slightly didactic moments to keep the audience up to speed. One specific example of that is when the narrator's veins and arteries form a network of motorways and A roads over their skin, only for the voiceover to immediately refer to them as such. Leaving the implication visual would have been more atmospheric, rather than explaining it for the audience's benefit.
But it's still very good, despite a few of these minor missteps.
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Scale is a short about Scale(s);
About the drug induced altering of one's sense of scale,
about giving away one's bathroom scale,
about the scale/chalk as a sediment in one's water boiler
and about scales as the skin of a reptile.
With every one of those having both a physical and a methaphorical meaning, we're talking eight kind of Scales here!8 out of 8
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Really well animated, trippy as hell film. Think A Scanner Darkly but even more nightmarish.
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Una sola idea, potencialmente interesante en tanto esencialmente cinematográfica, repetida sin más.
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Scale's depiction of a morphine addiction is downright Lovecraftian. An abstract examination of a life blending together to the point of arbitrariness, with the strange animation -- rotoscoped yet bizarrely flowing -- only helping to drive the themes home.
One of my favourites so far from the second annual Academy of Death Racers Festival! See this and over 50 other excellent short films for only $5! That's less than the toll for an unregistered class 3 vehicle on the A533 Mersey Gateway!
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Scale will be screened at the 2nd Academy of Death Racers Film Festival from the 6th - 22nd of January 2023. Get your virtual passes now by visiting our website.
[Animated Short Film Selection]
Driving along the motorway, Will loses his sense of scale. As his crippling drug addiction deepens, he struggles to unpick the sequence of events that led to his predicament, before he’s lost forever. An abstract dive into addiction and mental health.
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Watched as part of Friss Hus, Budapest 2023
A British / Czech co-production, this is about an author who destroys himself and his family with a drug habit so that he can manage to complete his book – a clearly pointless monograph that nobody is interested in reading. I can't help but compare this to my own fascination with creating a series on the Reformation, and I wonder if my own “work” is ultimately just as futile and self-destructive as his. In the end, he turns metaphorically into a lizard and takes up residence in a model village. It's impressive and shocking, as adult animation should be.
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