More

More is a short film which was originally directed in 1998 by Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda) and was selected as a feature in the 2008 Pangea Day Film presentation. It had also been nominated as for both a 1999 Oscar for Best Short Film in the Animated category and an Annie Award.

This is a stop-motion animated film which deals with a universal human “problem”; the desire and longer to always want more, hence the short’s name. The character longs to achieve his dream of creating something wonderful and achieving happiness and / or bliss. He achieves his goal, but finds that that was not really what he wanted after all.

The character works at a processing plant that manufactures “happy” which can be said to represent any commodity that companies sell as products are branded and advertized as helpful, useful things that will make life better and thus more happy. The character goes home and uses his passion (represented by the light behind his stomach door) to create “bliss” which he then markets and sell to achieve the goal of success. This is also a play with western ideals as people think that is you make something great and you make lots of money off that great idea you will achieve success and then be happy. However happiness does not work like that because it is not a tangible object. What the character really wanted, the bliss and happiness of freedom, he never achieved because he was so tied to the “success” method to happiness that he forget that he needed to go out and have fun and not be working all the time. As such this is a warning that if society becomes too involved with achieving new levels of success that people will forget to take a break from all that achieving and just relax and enjoy the moment and be happy.

Likewise color is a very important thing in this short film as it represents the emotions. Most of the film is dull and gray except for the playing children, the character’s stomach passion, the lenses of the bliss goggles, and the world that bliss shows when worn. Bliss is a fleeting sort of experience as when the goggles are removed, so is the color, and you are back in normal life. Bliss here is then not real bliss but the kind of distractions that people let fill their lives with to forget their jobs, things like reality television and video games. This things can be fun to interact with, but since they are false representation of reality due to their produced nature, real people cannot permanently live in such reality and must return to their jobs the next day. The children and the stomach passion however are real, the difference being that the passion was also a false reality since the character only experienced that bliss when he was creating his special glass, afterward it vanished. The children however are not surrounded by color, they are color itself. Since they are color their world is filled with color, everything they experience is new and exciting in different ways. They truly enjoy themselves rather than trudging along through the day. Seeing the world in a new way is great, but shifting to the side and experiencing the world in a new, exciting way each day and really appreciating everything is a very different mindset all together.

This short film can be watched below:

http://vimeo.com/7306050