Delightful short film inspired in part by Rene Laloux's animated work, "The Bellies" features a simple story about human avarice and arrogance in controlling nature, and how eventually nature and unacknowledged guilt prevail over greed and materialism. An unnamed gentleman, gross and piggy-eyed, gorges on snails for lunch at a restaurant; his fellow diners, all much the same as he is, eat the same meal in a bizarre co-ordinated Mexican-wave mass action. After lunch he goes back to the company laboratory where visitors await him: he explains the process by which small snails are genetically engineered to grow into ginormous gastropods for human consumption and takes his admiring guests on a tour around the facility. After the tour ends and the gentlemen sign a deal, the self-satisfied owner walks around the facility grounds where giant empty snail shells abound. On a whim, he crawls inside one such shell to assure himself he's not hearing strange ghostly noises
The animated figures are CGI-created while the backgrounds look as though they've been done with pencil and paint. Special effects are computer-generated. The figures don't appear at all realistic but they are meant to satirise self-satisfied bourgeois conformity. There's no speech but sprightly and playful acoustic music accompanied by sound effects emphasise mood and create, sustain and build tension. The whole cartoon has a very clean, spare look in keeping with the sanitised and conformist future society portrayed.
The last third of the film is the most surreal and really fits in with a dream-like Laloux-inspired universe: our piggy-eyed company director is forced to suffer as his factory-farmed snails have suffered and must run for his life. The film makes a point about how pursuit of materialist pleasure ends up eating you, how ultimately a culture based on gluttony will cannibalise itself. The giant fork that pursues the man turns into a creepy spider predator with a life of its own.
It's a little slow and drags out the story in parts, especially during the graveyard scene where the company director starts thinking he's hearing distant voices but overall "The Bellies" is an entertaining piece with a surprisingly deep message about a future, materialistic society and how it dooms itself into extinction.
The last third of the film is the most surreal and really fits in with a dream-like Laloux-inspired universe: our piggy-eyed company director is forced to suffer as his factory-farmed snails have suffered and must run for his life. The film makes a point about how pursuit of materialist pleasure ends up eating you, how ultimately a culture based on gluttony will cannibalise itself. The giant fork that pursues the man turns into a creepy spider predator with a life of its own.
It's a little slow and drags out the story in parts, especially during the graveyard scene where the company director starts thinking he's hearing distant voices but overall "The Bellies" is an entertaining piece with a surprisingly deep message about a future, materialistic society and how it dooms itself into extinction.
