Toyland (2007)

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Spielzeugland4 And A Half Out Of 5Spielzeugland is a plot driven short feature about a kid whose dream to visit an imaginative land and the catastrophe it breeds for the mother. The combination of fragile and destructive energy had never blended or compared to this extent, especially when it is fueled by the unseen force which is depicted metaphorically in multiple ways. It is rich on technical aspects like production design, editing and background score although the cinematography could have been a lot better, but it's a minor and a feasible flaw in this stunning masterpiece. The writing is smart, layered and adaptive that grows as it starts aging on screen and something that won't leave the audience even after the curtain drops; a though-provoking concept.The stunning camera work, morale conflicts, unfathomable intense drama and its eerie perspective are the high points of the features the helps elevate the momentum of the sequence. The screenplay by Bunners and Freydank is poetic with just the right amount of emotional touch that never overpowers the essential plot on screen and still manages to drive the whole feature with it. Jochen Alexander Freydank; the co-writer and director, has done an amazing work on executing the anticipated vision on screen whose impact leaves an endearing scar among the audience. It is scored majestically on the performance objective by Julia Jager whose portrayal helps convey the emotions out fluently. Spielzeugland is a maternal instinct gone wrong, projected at such a critical point, that no one possesses the potential to question it.

Toyland review, with spoilers.This is a dramatic movie. The lead roles were played by a mother, called Marianne, her son, called Heinrich, and her son's friend (a Jewish boy). The supporting characters were played by the Jewish boy's father and mother. It was set in a train station and block of flats. The movie had good acting, in two very strong scenes. One was the part where Marianne pretended that David was her son, risking to be discovered by the Nazis and also when his parents decided to give him to Marianne, knowing that doing this will save his life, even though it was a terrible pain, for them, to see her son with another mother. I think that is a great demonstration of love they have in their family. It shows the Jewish people's suffering in the war.The plot was about a child who lived in Germany in 1942 and he had a Jewish friend, called David. They played the piano together and spent a lot of time together. Heinrich, the German boy, insistently asked her mother where his friend was going to. She finally answered that he was going to Toyland because his Jewish father had a new job. Heinrich mother's said "Toyland" since she didn't want to say "concentration camp". Her son wanted to go to Toyland with his Jewish fiend because he thought it was a place full of toys and they could have fun there. One day Marianne didn't find her son and she looked for him very nervously but she couldn't find him in his bedroom. She went to the street and asked the police for him and then she went running to the train station. There, she talked to the soldiers and then they went to a wagon. There she didn't find Heinrich but she found David and she saved him because if she didn't do it, the Jewish boy would have died in the concentration camp. Then she went back to her house with Heinrich's friend and the three of them lived together.

I just saw Spielzeugland and recognized the whole plot almost from the beginning. I am positive I've seen it before, or read it. Does anyone else remember it? There was a Q&A with the writer and he didn't mention getting the plot from somewhere else. Anyone out there know this story from a maybe book or a t.v. show? That said, I did find it very moving and upsetting. The actress who played the mother did a fine job, as did the piano teacher. People may say holocaust-themed movies are overdone, but I don't think so; that era needs to be kept alive in peoples' minds so that it doesn't fade into oblivion as the final survivors die out. It's hard to believe the entire film is only l4 minutes long.

Today I went with three friends to a special showing of all the films nominated for the 2009 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. Oddly, the four of us were in pretty much agreement about the films. Our pick for best of the nominees was PIG ("Grisen"), though ON THE LINE ("Auf der Strecke") was a very good film and is nearly as deserving of the award. We predicted that TOYLAND ("Spielzeugland"), however, will win the award because it's the sort of the film the Academy tends to like AND because PIG might ruffle some feathers because it is not "politically correct". I'll update this review after the awards are given.TOYLAND is a film set during the Nazi era. A boy asks his mother about why all his neighbors (all Jews) are disappearing. She explains that everything is okay and that they have gone to "Toyland". Unfortunately, it sounds like such a nice place that the kid hopes to go there, too, and the film begins with him sneaking off with a shipment of Jews to the concentration camps because he wants to visit this magical place.Much of the film consists of the mother trying to find the boy and eventually the SS officers help her to try to locate the boy. This all ends in a marvelous twist that I won't reveal here, but this twist takes the film from the ordinary to the extraordinary.A lovely film that will probably win--in part, because the film is about an important subject that the Academy seems to like, the Holocaust (and highly reminiscent of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL), and in part because it is so exceptionally well-crafted from start to finish. My only reservation is that the print was awfully dark--practically everything looked black at times. Perhaps it was just a bad print.UPDATE: It's official, TOYLAND is the winner. This didn't surprise me at all and it was well deserving of the award, though I was still pulling for PIG to take the honors.