Creative people can very often seem weird, even a little crazy. The old man’s granddaughter is ashamed of him, and other children even make fun of them. But what the kids don’t know is that this outsider of a man is a superb inventor …
With stop-motion animation the puppets are brought to life very deftly. On the beach, children play with a ball on real sand, and the shimmering sea is made of plastic sheets. We can also recognise other materials: fabric, metal, wool, etc. Thanks to the sound effects, the accessories that come to life when there’s movement are all the more realistic, which is not unimportant in a film without dialogue. And there’s a lot of wind on this beach, so clothes, hair and umbrellas quiver when it blows. We really feel like we are on that windy beach!
This magnificently animated story also raises the issue of environmental protection and, especially, of recycling.
The old man spends his days picking up rubbish, that’s why the children mock him. And it’s true that it seems hard to take seriously an elderly man who hangs around bins. But they don’t know why he’s doing that: he’s inventing something absolutely fantastic! Here, then, recycling takes a lovely form. Not only is the man cleaning up the beach, but he also reuses what he finds, to create a wonderful machine …
This film also talks about accepting differences, especially within a family. Accepting that someone else is as they are, particularly if you don’t understand them. When the grandfather shows his granddaughter the mysterious machine, she finds out what he had been up to all along, and that’s when she starts to see things differently. It’s marvellously poetic how the two characters become accomplices. Her grandfather's difference no longer matters to the girl, as she accepts him as he is.
This film gives you a lovely moment of escapism on the beach, with a poetic tale, gentle music and, above all, the whole family!
