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1982-11-10
N/A
12 min
This animated short features Leonard, a 6-year-old boy with the unusual hobby of collecting sounds. Transforming household noises around him into exciting fantasies, he creates an adventure story for his older brother in which knights chase away monsters and perform other daring deeds.
There’s something quite unnerving about the almost double-jointed style of creature animation here, but the story is quite good fun. With the rain pouring down outside, the young “Leonard” is trying to engage his elder brother in a game of sounds. He has quite an imagination this young lad, and by using the routine sounds around their house manages to conjure up a story of a knight who encounters a vampire who needs to go to the dentist but is a bit frightened of a lion. Or, is that really just some pots and pans, a food mixer, a bee and some sea shells. It’s a charming testament to life before television did all of our imagining for us; to a time when we could look at the clouds and see faces or animals. The narrator sums up quite nicely a rapport between the two siblings that vacillates between the irritated and the fascinated, whilst the mother gets on with her chores and the father nurses a nasty cold that also provides for some of their children’s vividly interpreted sound effects. It’s a reminder of tech-free childhood that I quite enjoyed.
