Category Archives: Film

Capitalist lobsters!

Lobsters 龙虾 is a 1959 stop-motion short directed by Jin Xi 靳夕, adapted from a play by Lu Dan 芦丹. A restaurant proprietor attempts to dispose of his stock of spoiled lobsters by placing an ad for a dinner conference on Marxism.

I first saw this aired on TV back in 2002 or 2003, and have been trying to locate a copy ever since. Now thanks to the CCTV6/SAPPRFT venture M1905, it’s available online at last.[1] It’s a short and hilarious satire, so I won’t spoil it with a plot summary — just watch it:

The action takes place in an unidentified country sometime in the 1950s, with advertisements and newspapers that contribute an international flavor. On closer inspection the text is Romanized Chinese.

"Foreign" newspaper from "Lobsters"

“Foreign” newspaper from Lobsters

  1. [1]Note: I started this post in May 2014. This blog’s been dormant for a while.