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La Maison en Petits Cubes
Finished Airing Movie G - All Ages

La Maison en Petits Cubes

Tsumiki no Ie · 2008

An old man dives through his own flooded past.

#Award Winning #Drama
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StatusFinished Airing SeasonSpring 2008 StudioOh! Production SourceOriginal
Story

Synopsis

An elderly man lives alone in a town gradually swallowed by rising water, adding a new floor to his house each time the flood reaches him. When he drops his pipe into the submerged level below, he puts on diving gear and descends, and each floor he passes through returns him to an earlier stage of his life. Without a single line of dialogue, the short traces an entire marriage, a family, and a loss downward through the building he has spent decades outliving. Every floor he passes carries a memory he did not go down there to find.

⚠ Background — may contain spoilers
Directed by Kunio Kato, La Maison en Petits Cubes won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, an unusual achievement for a Japanese production in that category. Its gentle hand-drawn style and complete absence of dialogue make it entirely accessible across languages, and its structure, using vertical descent as a metaphor for memory, is frequently cited as an example of elegant visual storytelling. The short runs roughly twelve minutes and remains one of the most widely admired pieces of Japanese independent animation. Its Academy Award win brought unusual international attention to Japanese independent animation.
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