Elemi – The phone pole

Anilogue 2010, Filmcasino Vienna:

Ever wondered how it looks when a cat gets run over by a car from a phone pole’s point of view?
Or how a wise old phone pole talks about the world?
Or how the only way to anonymously buy a gift is to speculate on the stock market?
Or what kind of person rejects his social life to talk to a woman on the phone for days without asking when he can meet her?

Then Elemi might be your cup of tea.

It is a stop motion movie about… a phone pole. And she falls in love with a mechanic who fixes her after she gets lost in a War of the Worlds horror vision – or maybe it was a joyful vision I couldn’t tell. After that she practices telephone terror on the worker and he responds by talking to her on said phone.

Now I give you five minutes to figure out what the conflict in this movie might be.

The idea of Elemi is delightfully ridiculous and the way the different poles are designed to show human facial expressions might be interesting for the short while the movie lasts (45 min.).
The problem with the movie was that after reading the description I could figure out the story until the “revelation point”.

You know…

The moment when Spider Man turns out to be Peter Parker…
The moment when the blue people yell at the Avatar for being evil…
The moment when the sexy Japanese pornstar you imagined turns out to be a phone pole…

I let you chose the most shocking revelation.

So it was basically clear how the movie story would progress (minus the cat), the only question was, how would they utilize the conflict?
Since I could not think of any way this story could go on afterwards I decided to just let it happen and see if the producers could think of anything better…
Sadly they didn’t.

But if you like absurd experimental movies you might give Elemi a try.

Rating:

Category: 3
Score: lukewarm