Ice Merchants (2022) User Reviews

Thoughtful, innovative and beautiful

[rbsteury · 8/10 · 11 February 2023]

This short about a father and son living in a tiny cabin anchored on the side of an immense and icy mountain-side cliff is totally absorbing. There is no spoken word but the music is great. Father and son eke out their existence by taking ice to the village far below by jumping off their porch and parachuting down, then they come back up using a rope system. Since I am somewhat acrophobic, parts were a little difficult for me to watch (the son sitting on a swing thousands of feet above the ground - oh my!) but the basic colored line drawings were so engaging and gorgeous that one could not finish the film.

At first the ending is somewhat open to interpretation. Watching it a second and third time I picked up the hints scattered along the way as to what was happening that I had not fully grasped on my first viewing. I so appreciate being able to watch it on The New Yorker Screening Room.

Slow pace, yet sublime and heart warming

[rodryfily · 9/10 · 26 February 2023]

It's incredible how a 14 minute movie without a single word can move you this much.

With just simple and repeated scenes, the director manages to get you to know the characters. For that purpose, this movie makes use of color in a simple way that just makes sense. The slow pace just makes it feel natural and there is no rush to achieve the end of the story.

I also loved the soundtrack, every second of it adds to the story and, in the absence of words, acts as a good way to show feelings from the characters.

Loved this movie, and it's good to see it get this much attention, specially the Oscar nomination.

Wonderful animated short!

[UniqueParticle · 9/10 · 18 February 2023]

Absolutely gorgeous 14 minute short about a father and son that parachute off a steep mountain daily sometimes stylish and always peaceful! Hugely focused on feeling a sense of warmth even shortly. Ice Merchants is so good the bonding, the look of everything, and impressive! Magnificent and scary when heat finally arrives when the father and son least expect it; I can't imagine living the way they did. The music is quite tranquil and I love how the hat mountain towards the end looks like candy corn. Quite an interesting animated short that defiantly deserves some recognition regardless of win or not would highly recommend!

Quiet and beautiful

[aivilovee · 10/10 · 18 February 2023]

Out of all of the Academy Award nominees in the category this year, this film was by far my favorite, and I hope that it takes home the trophy come March.

Not only did it have a beautiful art style a creative premise, but the story itself really affected me.

I'm a sucker for animated projects without any dialogue, and I think this project perfectly exemplifies why. The story was simple yet impactful, and was universal so that anybody- no matter where they're from or what language they speak- could understand and empathize with it.

Ice Merchants to me was the clear winner of the nominees this year, and it's certainly worth fifteen minutes of your time.

My pick to win the academy award for animated short

[tediously_brief · 10/10 · 28 January 2023]

This short is my pick to win the academy award for animated short. The animation and color story in this emotional, and heartfelt. Such a layered story about grief, loss, love, passion, memories, heartache, adoration, hope, moving on, and finding the silver linings in life is absolutely flooring. The entire piece is a gorgeous, impressive, stylish piece of short form animation unlike any other I have ever seen. I watched it on The New Yorker's youtube channel, and honestly the style and vibe of this animation really fits with the outlet to be their home-it's such a perfect collaboration and the correct vibe. I would love love love to see more work from this talented portuguese animator, mr. Joäo Gonzales, and cannot wait to do so in the near future!

Angstful Parable with a sweet ending

[wall17 · 7/10 · 6 March 2023]

Take the drawing style of Ed Gorey, the sensibility of doom of Abner Dean, and the Sysyiphean zeitgeist of, oh, a filmmaker working in Communist-era Eastern Europe, and you'll have an approximate idea of the feel of Ice Merchants.

I'd warn you that any description of the plot would be full of spoilers, but the IMDB tagline itself is full of spoilers! My advice is to watch this cold, without any particular description of the plot, for best effect. You'll get a very deftly done, real sense of jeopardy for the characters, as well as experiencing the strangeness of the whole premise as one is meant to.

It's a parable for loss and recovery, grief and holding on to love, but wordless and without engaging in sentimentality. There's a reasonably nice revelation with a laugh out loud moment as we see something decidedly inexplicable and seemingly extraneous come in at the end. It's really quite touching, and again, if I explained the plot even a little bit, you'd likely lose the emotional sense that this film very adeptly creates.

This was not my first choice among the Oscar nominees for best short animation (we saw them all at one sitting) but it's a credible runner-up. If you're not literally on the edge of your seat watching this, I'd be surprised.

Beautiful, simple, surprising.

[leonardo-vcid · 10/10 · 26 February 2023]

Being able to tell such a story through beautifully simple details is amazing. Ice Merchants is a piece of art like the world needs more of.

The visual art and animation are both provoking and original.

The sound is wonderfully crafted.

The story brought me to tears.

A world where a good short animation like this, created with very little funding, wins an Academy Award is a better one. I really hope it wins.

Also interesting is the fact that ice merchants actually existed, a long time ago, even though that is more of a poetic backdrop to the story being told.

I'm looking forward to author's next creations.

Maybe Just Maybe

[atonalapplesauce · 7/10 · 11 March 2023]

Maybe if they didn't spend their money on hats on the time they wouldn't be put in the situation of having to work as ice merchants. Maybe invest in some rope or something to hold the hats on. Or maybe stop taking the hats knowing they will come off. I knew after the incident and before the plunge that those flipping hats were to break the fall. The meaning of the story is not easily found, and may be completely absent. The best I've come up with is be economical with your money so you don't need up in situation where you plunge to your death. Or maybe that everything works out in life even if you make stupid mistakes, like spending hundreds of dollars on hats, while only having one parachute, instead of you know, like at least four, just in case your clumsy with your one and only lifesaving device and let it plummet before you. Lovely animation though.

Hats

[jack_o_hasanov_imdb · 8/10 · 6 March 2023]

So simple, so beautiful and so meaningful. When I saw their house hanging on the mountain, I thought something would happen to them. Obviously, the man's wife, the child's mother is not alive. It doesn't show it with flashback. Very simple. A yellow glass and an empty side of the bed. Very meaningful and simple. I was expecting a bad ending. But the ending of the movie and the way it was finished impressed me a lot. It was so sweet. Among the ones I've watched (I've only watched 3 nomines yet), this is what I liked and was most impressed with. Also the music was very good. The shooting style is again like hand-drawn. I think it was fashion and style to be nominated for an Oscar. I criticized it. Also, a live action version of it can be shot. We can watch beautiful landscapes.

Offers a chance to do some math

[craig.duncan · 6/10 · 8 April 2023]

It's obvious from this film's first moments that it must be appreciated as a work of sketch art animation and emotional metaphor - that is, relax, watch, feel, try to stop thinking.

Doing that, the emotional message I got was gentle, but not pleasant. I think a viewer's reaction depends strongly on their life experiences: for older child and young adult viewers, its flavor of sadness and subtle reassurance bears enough novelty to feel good; for older ones, who have had ample experience with loss and sadness, there's no novelty, but rather dull recognition. My experience was the latter.

For those like me who find stopping thinking difficult, and instead wondered what became of all the lost hats, then were amazed at the number of them in the closing scenes, some quick estimation and calculation give that there are about 33,000,000 hats in the pyramid, making the family about 30,000 years old!

Beautiful and touching

[Moviemaniac30 · 8/10 · 10 March 2023]

Ice merchants its a beautifuly animated short about a father and a son who sell ice ultimately dealling with loss and grief and how to continue forward.

Inspired by a french animation Style and with a powerfull soundtrack that gonna make your heart feell every second and the absence of dialogue makes it a movie that everybody from everywhere can absorve independant of the age and country to which i mean its defenitely a must show to Kids and young adults with its message for all.

It is defenitely deserving of the Oscar nomination it has and makes you eager to what this newcomer director can do moving forward.

Ever Hear Of The Rule Of Three?

[boblipton · 4/10 · 19 February 2023]

Here's one of the nominees for the Best Animated Short Oscar in 2023. In the past, the Oscar nominees for best animated shorts have been plagued with pieces that could have been done easily as live action. None of this year's fall under that curse, nor the one about "animated radio", a lecture with some pictures.

Every day, a father and son chop ice from an ice cliff, then parachute into the town below to sell their wares. In the movie, this happens repeatedly. Far too often for my taste: it goes on for a quarter of an hour, when six minutes would have sufficed. Handsome artwork cannot make up for film makers who want to show you the same thing several times for no discernible purpose.

ice salute you

[lee_eisenberg · 8/10 · 27 November 2023]

The first Portuguese production ever nominated for an Academy Award depicts a man and his son who sell ice to make a living. João Gonzalez's "Ice Merchants" is a low-key, unassuming animated short that comes out well done. It just goes to show that animation doesn't need to be fancy, and certainly doesn't need the characters voiced by the celebrities of the moment (to be certain, this one has no dialogue). I found the short on The New Yorker's YouTube channel. I hope that more people get to see it, and that in the coming years more of the animated shorts become available for viewing. Some truly impressive filmmaking here.

Ice Merchants

[classicsoncall · 5/10 · 24 February 2023]

I've never been big on feature length animated films, but when I had the opportunity to see all five contenders for this year's Best Animated Shorts Oscar, I thought why not. I'm a product of all those great Warner Brothers cartoons of the Forties and Fifties, so the artistic style of this years' films doesn't appeal to me at all. As other reviewers have indicated what the story here is about, I won't venture into that. Suffice it to say that I wasn't as intrigued by this effort as the other commenters here were.

This picture is a contender for a 2023 Oscar in the category of Best Animated Film Shorts. I was able to catch it along with the other four contenders for this year's Academy Award at the Paramount Theater in Middletown, New York. If not for this limited showing, I don't know how else I would have been able to see it. So, Congratulations to the Paramount for making it available to enthusiastic cinema fans like me.

Chasing ice and a harmonic family life

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 10 March 2023]

The 14-minute "Ice Merchants" is an animated short film from the year 2022 and the writer and director here is João Gonzalez and this makes it a Portuguese production at its core, even if France and Great Britain were also involved. The international aspect to this film comes also from the fact that there is no spoken language in here. A film in the Portuguese language could have hurt the film's chances with awards bodies I guess. As a consequence, there are no voice actors credited here, but the awards reception was nothing short of gigantic. Impossible to list all the stuff it was nominated for or even won. It won 2 out of 3 nominations if we do the math, so this means that this film surely has a good chance to take the Oscar that it is of course also nominated for. We will see how this goes. With a Palme d'Or win and the pretty recent win at the Annie Awards, it would perhaps be unwise to bet against this one at the Oscars.

Unfortunately, I cannot really share the praise here. I did not enjoy this film as much as I wanted to and I also found it difficult to understand the story. Not necessarily because there was no talking in here, but I was just struggling to really understand what was going on and I am sure I was not the only one. This also made it more difficult to see the emotional impact then towards the end when the two seemingly fall towards death, but then are still saved somehow by another character. Or the boy's mother and father's wife plays a role there? I am just not sure. The hugging was kinda nice there in free fall, but still it was never the emotional father-son story I would have liked it to be and say this despite this being a subject I found touching in other (short) films. Like there is a really good animated short from many years ago from Holland if I remember correctly about a father and his daughter. But yeah, back to this one here. The animation style was kinda okay. I liked the use of colors here and there. It made the watch a bit more atmospheric and felt kinda right and artistic. But all this cannot make up for the story-telling issues here and I even love ice and snow in general, but yeah it was underwhelming. I have to give the outcome a thumbs-down overall and the only one I liked less than this one here from the nominated quintet is the entry from the National Film Board (rather "Film Bored" in this 2023 context) of Canada, but yeah I would not be surprised at all (sadly) if this film here wins the Oscar next weekend.