Ice Merchants (2022) – 2/5

Chasing ice and a harmonic family life

The 14-minute „Ice Merchants“ is an animated short film from the year 2022 and the writer and director here is João Gonzalez and this makes it a Portuguese production at its core, even if France and Great Britain were also involved. The international aspect to this film comes also from the fact that there is no spoken language in here. A film in the Portuguese language could have hurt the film’s chances with awards bodies I guess. As a consequence, there are no voice actors credited here, but the awards reception was nothing short of gigantic. Impossible to list all the stuff it was nominated for or even won. It won 2 out of 3 nominations if we do the math, so this means that this film surely has a good chance to take the Oscar that it is of course also nominated for. We will see how this goes. With a Palme d’Or win and the pretty recent win at the Annie Awards, it would perhaps be unwise to bet against this one at the Oscars.

Unfortunately, I cannot really share the praise here. I did not enjoy this film as much as I wanted to and I also found it difficult to understand the story. Not necessarily because there was no talking in here, but I was just struggling to really understand what was going on and I am sure I was not the only one. This also made it more difficult to see the emotional impact then towards the end when the two seemingly fall towards death, but then are still saved somehow by another character. Or the boy’s mother and father’s wife plays a role there? I am just not sure. The hugging was kinda nice there in free fall, but still it was never the emotional father-son story I would have liked it to be and say this despite this being a subject I found touching in other (short) films. Like there is a really good animated short from many years ago from Holland if I remember correctly about a father and his daughter. But yeah, back to this one here. The animation style was kinda okay. I liked the use of colors here and there. It made the watch a bit more atmospheric and felt kinda right and artistic. But all this cannot make up for the story-telling issues here and I even love ice and snow in general, but yeah it was underwhelming. I have to give the outcome a thumbs-down overall and the only one I liked less than this one here from the nominated quintet is the entry from the National Film Board (rather „Film Bored“ in this 2023 context) of Canada, but yeah I would not be surprised at all (sadly) if this film here wins the Oscar next weekend.