User Reviews

Henry Selick, known best for directing "The Nightmare Before Christmas", has a vivid imagination. He can create worlds from nothing, and draws audience into these made up fantasy places. But, even for a fantasy setting to work, a base is needed. "Nightmare Before Christmas" we are told that this is in Halloweentown, and that each holiday has it's own door, so when the plot begins unraveling, it makes sense. That's not the case here. Whatever this short is about is up to the viewer to decide, but it certainly isn't something that most can pick up right away.

A pair of clay animated conjoined twin sisters get out of bed only to see live action Slow Bob get transported to another dimension. In this dimension, people are alive in pictures, and scissors are attacking the town. Bob stops the scissors and is transported back to this house, only to have the twins paint him yellow. His watch then talks to him.

This is a crazy short. It's stylish, and especially reminiscent of Selick's later film "James in the Giant Peach" in the amount of animation styles there are, but it makes no sense. Perhaps it's a message saying that though people may not seem important, they still are, but it's a very convoluted message. The saving grace of this short is the bizarre style, which is unique to Selick. This world he created may make no sense, and may be strange, but it's interesting to look at.

Not much of a story can be found here, but a cornucopia of animation styles and neat effects are prevalent.

My rating: *** out of ****. 6 mins.

"Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions" is an American 5.5-minute animated short film from 1991 written, directed and produced by Henry Selick, who was in his late 30s at that point and still a pretty long time away from his Oscar nomination for Coraline. But in terms of darkness, absurdity and bizarreness, you can easily see his cinematic handwriting in this pretty awkward and creepy little short film. sadly I must say the film never lived up to my expectations beyond the solid approach in style. Voice acting, even if there aren't too many voices, is solid too. The characters feel too forgettable though in my opinion. I don't know if they intended to follow up on this one with a sequel, series or even full feature film, but maybe it was okay they did not because I think i would not have had too much interest to check it out. This one here is not a failure, but also not really on a level where I would recommend it, not even to Coraline lovers as I am kind of one myself and thiese 5 minutes did extremely little for me. Sure you cannot do too much wrong at this running time, but still the best decision here is to skip it perhaps.