Short Film: Logorama (France, 2009)

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.

"This guy sucks hairy balls"
Big Boy about Mr Clean

Written and directed by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain of the Parisian design studio H5 and six years in the making, Logorama is a wonderfully caustic animated film that appropriates virtually every logo you can think of – take your pick: at least 2,000, according to imdb, or more than 2,500 according to Wikipedia – and transplants them within a typically exaggerated Hollywood blockbuster scenario complete with a car chase, Tarentinoesque dialogue (supplied by Hollywood screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and Gergory Puss, according to the website Short of the Week), a major shootout and a devastating earthquake. That the film walked away with the 2010 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film is not surprising; what is surprising is that none of the international companies have made problem for the use of their corporate symbols – in this film, for example, both Big Boy and Ronald McDonald are notably less than the shining examples of citizenship than one would expect the respective corps to stomach. Mean and violent and with a vocabulary that renders the film NSFW, Logorama is a visual delight, a nasty laugh and wonderfully enjoyable.
Enjoy this ode to the pervading presence and power of the brand name and global consumerism, A Wasted Life's Short Film of the Month for June 2011.