User:Hiphophooper/sandbox

Director
Ishu Patel is an acclaimed Indian animation film director, producer and educator who has devoted his life to animation and photography. Born in Gujarat (India), Patel graduated from the University of Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, completed his graduate studies in Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design of Ahmedabad, and advanced Graphic Design at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland. A Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship brought him to the National Film Board of Canada, a country and a center to which he was linked for over 20 years.

Mythical Concepts as Film Identity
The use of mythical creatures became part of Patel's film identity. From his first film for the National Film Board of Canada, How Death Came to Earth (1971), based on Indian creation myths, through The Bead Game (1977), where thousands of beads are painstakingly arranged and manipulated into constantly changing shapes (Academy Awards nomination for animated short; BAFTA for short fiction film), Afterlife (1978), which offers an impressionistic view of death and dying (Canadian Film Award; Montréal World Film Festival Grand Prize for short film), to Divine Fate(1993) and The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation (1994), Ishu Patel has pursued his project of animating religious/mythical concepts and tales with great beauty and style.

Significance of Final Scene
The last image is a hopeful one, or at least one that holds a hopeful possibility. After showing the culmination of humanity’s military brilliance in a burst of atomic bombs, the scene is echoed with trees in place of mushroom clouds, with a central character ultimately placing the atom in the middle of a cat’s cradle. It’s a peaceful image, but a fragile one, too, without the inevitability of the earlier apocalypse.

Plot
A single bead multiplies into two beads. From there, they continue to expand, turning into Atom s which eventually transform into creatures. These creatures magically ingest each other then mutate into other mythical beings. For example, a monster eats a dinosaur then transforms into a seal. This sequence displays how creatures deal with conflict without the control of brain power.

As the cycle continues, the beads eventually turn into humans. The chronological arrangement demonstrates how civilization has dealt with conflict inspired by creatures of the past, only now, with the advancement of technology in terms of the weapons used. For example, in its earliest sequence, it shows humans blasting cannons into enemy territory. It then moves on to humans shooting rifles during war.

The entirety of the short film is based on how different time periods dealt with competition, this this case, it is displayed through malicious actions shown through the evolution of the beads.