I Lost My Body

It's time to start catching up with Oscar nominees that I haven't seen yet. Some of them are instantly available on Netflix, such as a Best Animated Feature nominee, I Lost My Body, which is poignant and completely original.

We start with a severed hand. Yes, a severed hand. It breaks out of its plastic bag in a refrigerator full of body parts, and goes on a quest. That it can see and hear requires us to suspend our disbelief. Along its path it encounters a pigeon, some rats, and a baby.

Parallel to the hand's story is a flashback to that of its presumed owner (a birthmark gives it away). He is a sad sack pizza delivery boy who is bad at his job. We see that he had an idyllic childhood, but his parents have died and he now lives with uncaring relatives in misery.

On one delivery, for which he is forty minutes late, he speaks to a young woman through her apartment building intercom. She is angry, but the two have a conversation before he leaves (her pizza, with extra onions, was destroyed in a traffic mishap). He tracks her down to her job at a library, and then follows her to her uncle's woodworking shop. In order to get to know her better, he begs the man to take him on as an apprentice.

All of this, of course, is leading up to how he loses his hand, and as it becomes clearer and clearer how he does the going gets a little queasy. But I Lost My Body is a story of pushing through pain and obstacle, both for the young man and the hand.

Every year I say this, but it bears repeating--the Animated Feature category, while nominating the usual suspects like Toy Story 4, also brings attention to animation I otherwise would never see, and I'm happy about that.