This was a deeply strange, original and often baffling three-part animated film. The common feature was a house – whether it was meant to be the same house is still something I am not sure about – and the three very different types of owners that it had. All three parts had bafflingly gnomic titles, again which I am not at all sure I understood or immediately saw the relevance of.
The first part – And Heard Within A Lie Is Spun – focused on a family who had a lavish mansion built for them into which they had to move and where their butler had a scripted role to play, at the behest of the house’s creator. The parents gradually changed until they were almost wholly transformed into house furnishings and the encouraged their daughter and her baby sister to leave, before the whole house was destroyed by fire. The animation and visuals – here as with all the o0thers – was stunning. The characters in this episode were human in appearance – but not quite. They all had a slightly furry, felted skin texture with very small mouths and eyes set very close together. pretty creepy(Then . Then house was the (common) main character in all these little films. The soundtrack was marvelously original too. The music had a strange alien quality – but not the usual ‘alien as in sci-fi’ sound.
The second part (Then Last Is Truth That Can’t Be Won) had a central character as a rat doing up a house and having to cope with two potential buyers moving into the house as well as a plague of creepily sinister fur beetles that paged him and infected the house. About halfway through there was an elaborate song-and-dance number for these creatures, to which my initial (and still now) reaction was, essentially, WTF?!!
Again, by the end, it was the house who, in a strange way, seemed to be the victor in this battle. This was probably the weirdest of the three weird episodes. I am still not sure what to make of it…
The final episode (Listen Again And Seek The Sun) had the greatest emotional impact; there was more empathetic emotion in this episode than in the others. A (the?) house was now surrounded by water and the owner/landlady had to cope with bizarrely strange tenants who only paid the rent in either fish or mystic crystals. Finally, as the tenants left the house, so did she, but with the house itself as the vessel on which she moved away over the floods. It was, inexplicably, quite a powerful and emotional ending – but I am not quite sure why! It seems that once she took control of the house, she could find or know herself. It will be interesting to read a few remarks online to see what other viewers made of it.
But certainly well worth seeking out -one of the most original animated films I have seen for a very long time.