Moxie (2011)
the final days in the life of a suicidal, pyromanic bear…
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Reviews
Powerful
best movie i've ever seen.
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
The plot to this short is, well, no wait – let me start again. Basically there is a bear. He misses his mother who died, and a bad thing happened. We follow him in a week of drugs, self-abuse, depression and ultimately death. If this sounds odds then let me assure you that the black and white animation makes it all the weirder as it has the combination of clarity and yet static interference at the same time and seems to show reality but yet also depict the drug-fuelled visions of the bear. And it ends with his death and acceptance that "it is very hard to live nowadays".The animation style is very hard to describe and I hope Irwin did this all himself because I cannot imagine him trying to explain his vision to someone else. It scratches around on the screen, mixes the horrific with the sublime, the ordinary with visions from drug use and also animation with what appears to be real-life film as background. It looks as great as it does weird though and I really loved how it came across. The cherry on top of this is the dialogue and the performance. The voice word from Gudrun is really a perfect fit – she has a very Icelandic tone, very clipped and matter-of-fact and this absurdly calm approach is pretty effective when contrasting with the journey of the bear. Likewise the dialogue is really well written and it sounds like it is another language translated into functional English (which again compliments the use of the Icelandic accent to deliver it).The overall impact is a short film that is visually as beautiful as it is weird and it contrast the madness of the events with the calm ordinariness of the Icelandic narrator – it is a series of contrasts that work really well and, although it was bewildering, disturbing and very dark, it really stuck in my mind as something I loved to experience – it got several viewings from me and I know it is one I'll check again in future when the memory of it drifts by me.