User Reviews

The title "The Windshield Wiper" is pretty much a mystery like itself in my opinion. Why the film is called like that. The writer and director is Alberto Mielgo and for him it is a huge success as this film has managed to score an Oscar nomination this year, which could be a foundation for a lengthy career for the man. It runs for a quarter of an hour and in these 15 minutes it shows us several vignettes basically. It is a co-production between Spain and the United States and the language used most frequently here is English. A bit Romanian too I see now. Not sure where though. The homeless man? He was almost impossible to understand. But you don't need to to grasp the contents. Anyway, the film starts and (almost) ends in a slightly pretentious manner with the question asked "What is love?". I must say I could have done without the entire café segment there, but maybe it's just me. It wasn't horrible either, but added very little. The vignettes were more crucial and entertaining, of course the one about the man and woman in the supermarket using some dating app and creating an online match even while standing physically next to each other and then going on without writing or talking to each other. The absurdity of the digital world at full display you could say here. Funny, yet sad at the same time. I am not sure if this idea was entirely original or if something like this "joke" was done on previous occasions already. Probably. But no blame on Mielgo. The way he did it, also animated it was nice and it worked well and stayed in the mind.

With this film here, I think it was okay all the time pretty much, but the ending was quite good, a step up in quality, and for me the decisive aspect to eventually go for the positive rating and thumbs-up here. It was not the greatest year for animated shorts if we look at the nominees and I would say that I rank this third out of five, even if in other years it maybe would have landed on the last spot of my personal ranking. This is another one like three (maybe even four) of the nominees that you probably would not want to watch with your kids. It's animation for grown-ups, not only because of a woman being topless on a few occasions, but also in terms of the story and style and plot. If there is something like that. It feels a bit wild at times. This is definitely the one film from the nominees in which the characters look most like real people, actual humans. I think some segments even weren't animated at all. But apparently still enough for the film to be accepted into competition for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. It's a truly close call, but overall I'd say that it deserves to be watched, even if I am not too curious about Mielgo's future projects. Maybe he can prove me wrong and deliver something superior to this alright work here. I would not be too happy if it wins the Oscar. Hopefully, it will be Aardman or the Russian entry, but my guess is Chile takes home the prize. The Windshield Wiper can be seen once and that is enough.

Obvious, you feel it more than a film about love. And more than animation . Slices of near reality, very familiar , very far by cliches, naked truths and forms of loneliness in something easy called as love. A great short film for admirable craft, for stories, in my case for the dialogue in Romanian about colors defining people and relation, powerful for suicidal scene but, especially, for the couple on the beach. Short, pure gem.

An okay short, with very nice visuals.

Some parts were a bit corny (Especially that cheesy monologue at the end about love being a "secret society") and it felt a little bit longer than it should have been, but it was a decent watch.

"Love". There has never been a more misunderstood, complex, hallucinatory, dangerous and rare word. Nothing else has made us feel joy and fear, confusion and pain, on the same level as love.

The Windshield Wiper is a short film by Spanish filmmaker Alberto Mielgo, who has worked on all kinds of projects such as "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", "Corpse Bride", "Love, Death & Robots" and even in the visual effects of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1". From its first frame, it already invites us to give a 180 ° turn to traditional animation, which by convention is limited only to children.

In the short film we are shown different vignettes of content, narration, animation, voices, music and editing, which are based on personal aspects of the director's life: emptiness, love and relationships, and how these can influence our perspectives and longings, expectations and disappointments - a philosopher smoking in a cafe while listening to other people's talks about love, a tramp practicing catharsis with a mannequin, a suicidal woman gazing into the abyss, a couple sitting on a beach... two strangers looking for the love that's right next to them in a grocery store...

The entire short film is made up of color palettes opposed to the standard dark = bad, light = good, etc., giving its own and varied personality to the multitude of situations that, developed in more detail, could be one of the best love anthologies ever made.

To speak of The Windshield Wiper as a simple short film would be an insult. It is a work of art in which Alberto Mielgo stamped his essence, from the direction, to the script, the editing and the sound design itself.