The Stone of Folly. (Short Takes).

2002 9m prod Sweet Thing Productions, p/d Jesse Rosensweet, sc Jesse Rosensweet, Alastair Dickson, ph Jeremy Benning.

Jesse Rosensweet's assured debut animated film is a story about having rocks in your head. (Where does that expression come from, anyway?) It's also, atrociously and hilariously, about how to get them out. Inspired by the Hieronymous Bosch painting, Removal of the Stone of Folly, it's the story of a doctor in a decidedly dank medieval hospital who is in the process of, er, surgically removing a stone from the skull of an unfortunate patient. The methods are crude and, surprisingly enough, very effective. So, too, is the method of disposal of the stone once it has been extracted. Rosensweet's fictional world is populated by ingeniously devised animated figures, is a gorgeously rendered palette of greys, blacks and reds, and his mise en scene in miniature is worthy of comparisons to the imaginative dystopian fantasies of Terry Gilliam. While its music is a bit ostentatious and its meaning more than a tad obscure, The Stone of Folly is an impressive and inventive piece of puppet animation. Winner of a Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival (indeed, awarded by a jury that included no less than the luminary likes of Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton and Abbas Kiarostami), The Stone of Folly also rather riotously announces the arrival of a substantial new talent to the top ranks of contemporary Canadian animation.