"Balance" by German twins Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein
"Balance" is an Oscar-award winning stop-motion classic, and it happens to be one of my very favorite short films. In fact, it was one of the very first short films I ever saw, back when I first started college in the dark days before folks took streaming video and the availability of a hundred cable channels for granted. "Balance" is a allegory about the consequences of greed (or is that curiosity?) told entirely without dialog in a storyline that plays out like an eerie dance. In it, five mysterious figures must work in concert to maintain the balance on the platform on which they float through their grey world. Then, their routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious box.
I have been told by wiser film enthusiasts that this film was created in post-communist Germany as an allegory for the fall of Soviet communism. The men, interchangeable except for their numbers, represent communist society. Meanwhile the music box can be seen as a representation of Radio Free Europe, which used to broadcast American music, such as the jazz, into Communist countries throughout the Cold War.
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1989, the film has been featured in a few animation collections, including the now sadly out of print, “The World’s Greatest Animation.” Thankfully, the internet has saved us once again. Rather than passing into obscurity, the film has been uploaded to at least half a dozen user-generated content sites. If you notice that this video has gone dead for any reason, please drop a comment, so that I can re-post it from a fresh source.
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