journal features

movie review - The House of Small Cubes

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2017.11.20

This is a perfectly-paced animated short about a rising flood that causes one aging gentlemen to progressively build new stories onto his home. When he drops his pipe into the rising waters, it's a cause for him to re-explore all of the previous levels and what each layer of his home taught him through the events that happened when he lived at each.

It's delicately drawn, it's virtually silent, and it's quite engrossing.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner