Or as I'd like to call it The Story of 514: A Great Lottery Story... An inspiration to us all. Alek Wasilewski's Lucky Day Forever is a 16-minute short animated film, and I'm recommending it, because it shook me up a bit after watching it here at my desk. And you know, I wouldn't recommend anything that doesn't affect me in any way. After all, that's why we watch movies, look at art, listen to music, right? Or at least, one would hope so.
Wasilewski's Film Annex bio consists of one sentence, and it goes like this: Alek Wasilewski's very talented. As much as I found this bio obnoxious at first, I couldn't help but be intrigued by it. I thought, if this is how this filmmaker is presenting himself, he better be good. And he was.
Lucky Day Forever tells the story of Prole 514, a working class citizen who wins the lottery and enters the sexed up world of the privileged white, where everybody is young and happy. As the story progresses, we see that 514, who was once black and miserable is now white and happy. The film of course questions whether 514 is actually truly happy or not in his new skin with a sequence in which our character floats through time and space in the company of ambient/space rock type music (AIR, anyone?). I won't tell more about the plot as I want to avoid spoilers, but this should give you the idea that Lucky Day Forever is one of those dark, dystopian films that questions the current state of our society. And it's very very well done. In fact, on his website, Wasilewski tells us that he was "born in Warsaw, Poland in George Orwell's year of choice." Orwell... there you have it.
The graphics are mouth-watering, the choice of music is appropriate, and the expressions of the characters are real. The film finds a good balance between satire and darkness and saves itself from being a downer. It's a real pleasure to watch and I recommend it to you all.
