Street of Crocodiles

1986
7.6| 0h21m| en
Details

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

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Channel 4 Television

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Reviews

Wordiezett So much average
AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Rectangular_businessman The brothers Quay, like Jan Svankmajer, made dark, beautiful stop-motion/ puppet animations. The short film "Street of Cocodriles" is possible the best work of the Brothers Quay: The atmosphere is thrilling, beautiful, and all the characters that appear on it have a unique, fascinating appearance.Inspired in the story written by Bruno Schulz, this short film manages to be disturbing and unsettling, without using blood or any kind of violence. Even without words, you could feel the fear of the main character while he is in the Street of Cocodriles, where he finds several mysterious beings. Heavily metaphorical, like the other shorts of the Brothers Quay, the music made by Leszek Jankowski helps a lot in order to portrait a bleak and mysterious realm.This is one of the best animated shorts I've ever watched. I was more thrilling than any horror movie that I watched recently.
Jason Arber Devotees of Jan Svankmajer and Kafka, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay distill every disturbing dream you've ever had into a decidedly unsettling short film. American by birth, the twins seem European by sensibility and have settled in London to make their films. Street of Crocodiles is one of their better known efforts and is obliquely influenced by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, who published the memoirs of his solitary life under the title, Sklepy Cynamonowe (literally translated as The Cinnamon Shops, although generally known in the English speaking world as Street of Crocodiles). The Quay's short follows a gaunt puppet who is released from his strings as he explores his bizarre surroundings: rooms full of dark shadows, unexplained machinery and strange eyeless dolls. Everything has a sense of decay and Victorian melancholy. There is a notion of a plot, possibly dealing with sexual tension, but really Street of Crocodiles is about establishing a mood and a nightmarish and deeply sinister world. The Quay's use of tracking shots and selective focus is unparallelled in the world of stop motion.
desperateliving We feel as if we're in a completely different world watching this -- and not necessarily just because of the animation, which is spectacular. It has more to do with the architecture of the images, and the way the camera investigates the space -- you feel as if you're in a shoebox, tinted with brown-gold sepia tones of rot. The way the camera moves is really very striking. For the comparisons to Kafka, I think it's specifically in the dislocation of the image that the Quays bring out his influence. This film is as if Jack Skellington went down the wrong tree. (The eyeless dolls must have influenced "Toy Story"'s horror sequence.) We're in this strange, unfamiliar place, and the camera slides around in very smooth yet jittery movements as if our eyes. We see objects like screws move around on their own, and objects drop calmly as if the sky is falling; our vision is distorted as images of our hero are stretched. I haven't read the Bruno Schulz, so I'm pretty much limited strictly to experiencing this visually. 10/10
Klaatu-21 This is truly one of the creepiest movies around. The gloomy atmosphere builds and builds until you can barely stand it. There's something about it that reminded me of the helpless childhood nightmares we've all had, even though all you're seeing is animated junk. I've known several people who were unable to view it all the way through.