Rating: 17/20 (Buster: fell asleep)
Plot: A busted marionette, a teddy bear, a cute little doll, and some sort of potato man enjoy a halcyon existence in their suitcase home. One day, however, an evil head sends his minions to capture Buttercup the doll, presumably for nefarious purposes. The others have to travel other parts of the titular attic in order to save their friend.
This, sort of like what the outcome would be if you had Czech stop-animation guys do their own Toy Story, is the kind of animation I can appreciate. Buster, by the way, was completely mesmerized before dozing off. Unfortunately, I started watching it past her bedtime and she couldn't make it. There's so much creativity here, so many beautifully grotesque things to look at. The characters are fun even if they--the good guys, at least--don't have a lot of personality. The potato man, endlessly bludgeoned and hurled and splattered and flattened, added some slapsticky comic relief while the antagonistic bust--a creepy guy with a lot of paint on him--and his motley crew added enough darkness and intensity to keep things interesting for adults as well as make you nostalgic for the good old days when communism depressed everybody. I assume this is allegorical, but it's enjoyable despite the darker undertones. This is Jiri Barta's work, and unless you count his 1986 version of the pied piper story as full-length (it's just under an hour), this is his only full-length film. It's actually the first thing he'd done since 1989 which, if my math is correct, is a 20 year gap between projects. I'm not sure if he worked on this thing for 20 years or not, but the details and movements in this do make it seem like the type of thing that had to have been created with a lot of love and time. It's the kind of animation (stop-motion, Czech) that I fall for easily anyway, but it's also the kind of thing that can get tedious after a while. This never does, and the way Barta cleverly animates things like water or fire never look real but is always a lot of fun. So many moving parts in this thing, the kind of thing you might want to watch twice to see what may have been missed in the backgrounds. More fun and colorful and for kids, though not entirely for kids, than Svankmajer or the Quays, this blows things like Frozen and Planes away in its ability to continually surprise and excite. Definitely recommended if you like Eastern European stop-animated stuff. And anybody who doesn't is missing out.
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