Short Film Showcase: Simplicity Leads to Complexity in the Dialogue-Free Animated Short 'Balance'

"Balance," the 1989 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film, uses spare sets and designs along with fantastic character animation to highlight themes of selfishness and the breakdown of communism.

Take a look before we dig in below.

The film's directors, German brothers Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein, take the exaggerated design elements of German expressionism and strip them down to their simplest form.  The five nearly featureless figures of the film, each with a corresponding number on their back, call to mind the titular monster in F.W. Murnau's silent horror masterpiece Nosferatu, which immediately imbues them with an eerie detachment from humanity.  The figures work together for a short time, each moving appropriately to balance the world in which they live, but the harmony is short-lived.  After finding a music box, the figures descend into curious jealousy and selfishness.  Coming just at the end of the cold war and the reign of communism, the film makes some salient and uneasy connections between the selfish nature of humanity and the hopelessness of the utopian ideal.  

The fact that the brothers accomplish this without the characters uttering a single word, underlines the amazing animation work in the film.  Without changing the facial expressions of the five figures, emotions and motivations are signaled primarily through the subtleties of body language.  An unbroken stare or a confident step forward read as envy or self-righteousness, respectively.  The longing for individual happiness comes through the desperate grasping at the music box as it inevitably slips from their grasp.  Also, the Lauensteins expertly build tension through character movement.  At the beginning of the film, the balancing figures step around with tentative and cooperative hesitation.  As the film progresses, however, those initial timid movements build in a steady crescendo to the confident and reckless movement of the climax as the characters give in to their most selfish instincts.

The animation, working with the brilliantly spare design and sound, hammers home the cutting and cynical themes of the short.  Hauntingly beautiful and deceptively simple, the Lauenstein's dare you to see yourself in the blank characters, implicating us all in the mutually assured destruction of our own happiness.  The poignant final shot, of a lonely character standing helplessly out of reach of true satisfaction, will undoubtedly play in a continuous loop of self doubt long after you watch the film.  That kind of resonance is the mark of a truly great film.