KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

MartinHafer This is a lovely film with very nice CG animation. It begins with a rat following a cheese puff wrapper across the roof tops in a big city. By accident, the rat falls into some weird fully automated lab filled with white lab rats. The new rat is captured but with the intervention of the same wrapper, he is able to try to make his escape.How much you like this film will probably depend on your feelings about animals and animal testing. Though it's never clear what will happen to these rats, it seems as if the makers of the film have a strong anti-animal testing bias and it seems they are perhaps trying to influence the viewer accordingly. Because of my background in psychology (where we treated the rats wonderfully and didn't harm them in any way), I am always leery of films such as this one or THE SECRET OF NIMH that seem to offer simplistic messages that people who use lab animals are evil. However, I can't let my own background color my impression of this film too much. Despite a relatively weak story, the animation is super-impressive and the story well constructed. It is well worth a look.This film is one of the bonus shorts included with the wonderful DVD "A Collection of 2006 Academy Award Nominated Short Films"--a must have for fans of the genre.

valerie_lp I'm not an animation junkie, and spent this weekend in the theatre watching last year's Oscar shorts (live-action and animated) because it was free and I was bored. I believe ORS didn't even make it to the Oscars, though it was shortlisted. But it was, to me anyway, clearly the best thing in the animation category, and possibly of them all. It looks great--not too derivative, not too abstract or "cartoony," and definitely NOT like CGI. The surfaces are so real (fur, metal, glass) you feel like you can touch them, the contrasts between dark and light are expertly used, and the scene where the Cheeto is crushed in slow motion is simply beautiful. The music was perfectly suited to the action, almost another character in itself. And on top of it all, it has fast-paced suspense and a touching love story, with the right ending for a change (something far too many films featuring humans fail at). This film has stayed with me long after many of the others I saw that night have faded. I'm sure sure I'll buy it off iTunes...but I have to wait a bit, since it affected me so much I'm not sure I'm ready to watch it again yet!

Polaris_DiB This animation is very beautiful, but very weird. It's a strange mix of the animal and the anthropomorphic, and the recognizable and the alien. A hungry rat follows a bag of cheetos into a ventilation shaft, which gives away to an animal testing facility where he meets a white female rat, and the two fall in love. They manage to have some brief moments together before a failed escape keeps them permanently apart, in a touching moment of loss.What's the testing facility for? We don't know. Are the white rats genetically engineered? They may be. The story is told through the perspective of the hero rat, so narrative answers like these aren't given. Yet the strange and alien world the rat finds himself in seems so utterly familiar within its alienation, partly because of its science fiction tropes and partly because the rats aren't just rats, they do have vestiges of anthropomorphic characterizations (which become more and more recognizable as the short goes on).This alien/familiar dichotomy creates both wonder and fear, which is aided by the dark film noir quality of the outside of the facility and the washed-out white quality of the inside. No space really seems comfortable in this animation, which makes it terribly cynical. However, the ballet-quality exposition of the bag and the moment when the rats are together give it just enough hope for the audience to really relate to this rat's strange/familiar adventure, which makes the ending just that much more powerful. I don't know what it means, but I can't shake it from me.--PolarisDiB

mdkarr This short was a pleasant surprise. What a great plot - very original. Who would have thought to make a short love film with rats. They are so misunderstood. I love fancy rats as pets and this short showed that these people know their "rat movements" and how they react to one another and that rats can love too. They looked very realistic like I could just reach out and pet one. They made their fur look soft. The city scape was very realistic and I found myself holding my breath when the little one fell into the science lab. The film movement was fluid and not jerky. The animation was very clean and had just enough shading to make everything look real. I hope to see more animations from them in the near future. Who knew bar codes could mean trouble in the end.