Harlekin

Here is a typically graceful and beautiful example of Lotte Reiniger's silhouette animation, a ballet of two lovers to baroque music. I don't have a word to say against it; Miss Reiniger's work lives up to her impossibly high standard. Yet there's the numeric rating of the IMDb and here's a review in which I must say something, so here we are. As I've noted elsewhere, all reviews are subjective, a matter of the reviewer's taste and writing ability rather than the artist's. So this review will be about my taste, and I hope you can glean from it some sense of whether you agree or disagree and more importantly why.

First, the baroque music. It's all very skillful. Yet there is something slow and dull. Polyphony was still a big deal during Baroque's heyday, and concessions had to be made to the audience's ability to follow what was going on. Because the images match themselves to the music, this produces a sense of much ado about nothing offered as a great matter. Given the great length of this piece Miss Reiniger's longest since the dazzling and varied fantasy of THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, it shows vey poorly.

Yet there is no sense in my mind that this is a lesser work. It's merely one that does not appeal to me particularly. How do you feel about it?