Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"The Story of Stuff" is a 21-minute short film from 2007, so this one has its 10th anniversary this year. It was written and directed by Louis Fox and it is probably the most known career effort by him. The success of this one also resulted in him making more "The Story of" short film in the years afterward, but I think this one here is not only the most known, but also the longest. His collaborator on the script was Annie Leonard and she is also the narrator we see in this little movie, the only non-animated component of it all as she keeps telling us about the economy, the environment and the techniques of big companies and keeping their customers as satisfied as poor. So yeah, i think as I wrote in the title of my review that the idea behind this film is an honorable one, but the execution is pretty shoddy. First of all, it is all incredibly rushed, especially the narration, and they are simply touching way too many subjects and areas for a film with this runtime. It also isn't helping that the film apparently pretty randomly goes very much into detail about certain aspects while staying up way above the surface when it comes to others. It's just an example of weak writing I believe. And then there are problems with the narrator including himself in all of this, for example when she tells us she bought a radio for five bucks recently because we all know she did not. The animation is okay. It may be very simple, but it fits the idea as it is much more about the message than the depiction. But the big problem is that it is virtually impossible for audiences to take something from this movie apart from 2-3 interesting little facts. With approaches like these, I am not surprised nothing has changed for the better in the last decade because this movie is exactly the film version of what it criticizes. Do not watch.
