Directed By: Nirvan Mullick
Written by: Nirvan Mullick
Awards: "Winner of several awards, including Best Debut at the 2002 New York Expo of Short Film"
Trivia: The Trenchcoat Man puppet is only 8 inches tall
A man in a trenchcoat, who lives in an unidentified city, is walking home one evening when he spots a cardboard box sitting on the sidewalk across from his building. As he’s inspecting the box, the man is shocked to discover a pair of human eyes peering back at him from a small slit in side of it. Frightened, the man quickly retreats to his apartment, yet can’t get this box or its inhabitant out of his mind. Whenever he looks out his window, he sees the eyes staring at him, and after several hours of this he decides enough is enough, and takes matters into his own hands …
Inspired in part by a novel written by author Kobe Abe, The Box Man was a true labor of love for its director, Nirvan Mullick, who dreamt up the project while a film student at CalArts. As it turns out, this stop-motion animated short would take him two and a half years to complete, with Mullick constructing everything himself, from the main puppet to the city’s brick walls (which took about 6 weeks to detail). Fortunately for him, his hard work paid off in the end.
Aside from the various awards it won (among others, it took home the Best Animated Short film award at the 2002 Cinequest San Jose festival), The Box Man is a masterwork of paranoia and fear, with its shadowy streets and dark corners reminding one of the great film noirs of the 1940’s and ‘50s. And even though its story (a mysterious box) is quite simple, the movie offers up some jarring images that, in the end, are more disturbing than either the box or its occupant.
That Mullick accomplishes this in only a few minutes time makes The Box Man all the more impressive.
