Alma - by Rodrigo Blaas

I saw this film and I think it absolutely nails a successful storyline for a short animated film.

On the face of it it is a very simple tale: a small child is fascinated by a doll made in her own image, but when she touches the doll she falls under a sinister spell and is trapped inside the doll's body. Immobile on a shelf she can look around but is powerless to act and it turns out that she's not the first - and won't be the last.

The shortness and simplicity of the story is ideally suited to this format. However, despite its simplicity  the story taps into a rich well of classic mythological and fairytale themes: the loss of autonomy through bewitchment, the hazards of too much curiosity, the hidden dangers of desirable objects, the pitfalls of stepping off a well trodden path into the unknown. (This is redolent of Joseph Campbell's theory of the Monomyth whereby themes from mythology form the basis of an overarching narrative that occurs across different cultures and eras.)

Similarly Blass draws on a theme from the horror cannon whereby childhood iconography (a clown, toys or a trike for example) is subverted and made all the more sinister because of its original, more innocent, association.

Finally, the twist at the end is beautifully realised; causes the viewer to reexamine earlier events from a different perspective and, crucially, leaves us with a sense that the story continues beyond the end of the film.

A temptation when making a short is to breathlessly cram 90 minutes of storytelling into 5. What Rodrigo Blaas does so brilliantly with Alma is to tell a story that can be summarised in 20 seconds, but is so rich in the dark allegories of other timeless narratives that we're drawn into the world of the story and are left wondering what might possibly come next.