Head Over Heels
2012 · 10m · UK
Directed by Timothy Reckart
Genres: animation, comedy, romance
An elderly married couple have drifted so far apart that one lives on the floor and the other on the ceiling — a stop-motion fable about estrangement and reconnection.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Oscar-nominated couple-on-the-ceiling stop-motion — the conceit is genuinely lovely and the execution is unimpeachable. Fine, I'll be tender about this one.
Reckart's Oscar-nominated Cartoon d'Or winner deserves its laurels — the gravitational-split metaphor for marital estrangement is the kind of conceit Aardman would envy, and the formal simplicity is its precision. A small classic of the late-Aughts British animation moment.
Academy Award nominee and Cartoon d'Or winner — the gravitational-split conceit is one of those formally pure stop-motion ideas where the production design IS the emotional argument. Reckart went on to direct The Star, but this is the better film.
Festivals
- Cannes 2012
- 85th Academy Awards 2013, Nominee