Robert Reynolds This short was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short. There will be mild spoilers ahead: This short was done prior to The Triplets of Bellville, which is a masterpiece. The animation, character designs and backgrounds are the same style as Bellville. This short is even odder than Bellville.The short centers around a gendarme who is starving (I guess the job must pay horribly or something, because with one exception, every other character in the short is overweight or grossly obese, particularly the American tourists). He discovers a large gathering of seriously overweight pigeons to find that an old lady is feeding them.Instead of doing something sensible, like strangling a pigeon or two and eating them, he actually takes one home and uses it as a model to construct a large pigeon head (there's a particularly disturbing shot of said pigeon later in the short). The Gendarme then goes to the old lady's apartment and insists on being fed, which she does pretty much daily.Ultimately, the gendarme grows grotesquely obese. One Christmas Eve, he discovers the intentions of the old lady aren't to his long term benefit and departs the apartment in a hasty manner.The close of the short is funny and the gendarme gets what he deserves. I should very much like a DVD or Blu-Ray release of this in the US, but doubt it will happen. It's well wort tracking down. Most highly recommended.

Stompgal_87 I first heard of this short when I saw that it was on the same DVD collection of short films as Andrea Arnold's gritty yet thought-provoking 'Wasp' and for a start I didn't know it was animated until I stumbled upon its IMDb profile, which made me want to see it more because I love animation. Upon watching it on YouTube, I found it bizarre yet amusing in parts.The opening and closing scenes of some American tourists in Paris were colourful with accurately-drawn backgrounds but also one of the most unusual parts of the film because I was expecting French dialogue, which was present in 'Ernest and Celestine' but they were speaking English with French subtitles on the screen. The human characters are oddly designed as well but the animation is smooth for the most part. There is minimal dialogue outside the opening and closing scenes and the colours of the scenes of the old lady feeding the pigeons are not the brightest. Although she speaks gibberish, I found her a generous character. The principal male character is grumpy and greedy but I enjoyed watching his bizarre nightmare where some human/pigeon hybrids eat a pig the old lady leaves for them as well as his insides. Another odd part was the repetitive sequence of the man coming to the old lady's flat wearing a papier-mâché pigeon mask to be fed from mid- September until Christmas Eve and progressively becoming fatter. The incidental music is nearly as sparse as the dialogue but I like its authenticity.Out of all four French animated independent films I've seen so far this year ('The Illusionist,' 'The Monk and the Fish,' 'Ernest and Celestine' and this one), this is the strangest one but all in all a pleasant surprise with its funny moments. 8/10.

Maciek Kur After "Tripplets of Bellvile" (which is my favorite animated movie of all time) I was hungry for more of Sylvian Chomet unique world...Thankfully I've soon found "The Old lady and the pigeons"! A movie set in the same universe and with the same charm and grotesque of the "Tripplets". Its short but but it will make you want watch it over and over again (over and over) Its very hard to describe this story without ruining for you as all of movie elements connect together in a wonderful way and story is building in a very oryginal way you never seen beafore. In fact this movie has "oryginal" written all over. Just trust me when I say - if you enjoy Tripplets or have a dark sense of humor you will enjoy this one very much!WHY THEY Don't MAKE MORE MOVIES LIKE THIS is a riddle to me...

didi-5 This wonderfully dotty short film from the creator of Belleville Rendez-vous, Sylvain Chomet, really is fantastic. It has an original storyline - a starving gendarme, some greedy fat pigeons, a pigeon-obsessed lady, and some wild dancing.The animation puts its grotesque characters (which put me in mind of the drawings of Gerald Scarfe) into a world all of their own, where the gendarme fantasises about food, is irritated by pigeons, and eventually dresses up as one of the birds himself to continually visit the old lady for slap-up meals.'The Old Lady and the Pigeons' is the epitome of bad taste cartoons, a darkly fun half-hour in the company of skewed figures and warped minds.