Flatland the Film (2007)

This film either awoken me or broken me and I can’t honestly tell which. I started to watch this, but I restarted it so that my sister can join in. A bit into the film she said that she saw this film in an high school math class. Which is Buck Wild considering what this movie really was about. Overview: A Square is, well, a square, who lives in his plane of reality, dealing with his family, children, and political turmoil over multicolored laws and threatening neighboring nations. However his entire world is shaken (literally) as he is forced into a new way of thinking.

The movie was very engaging from the very beginning. There’s this sassy text narrator that just come and explains things, or just makes commentary on how things works. It’s only around for the first half of the movie, but it does break the ice on how Flatland works. So we can laugh as we try to work our way around the world.

I got really invested in the political war of flatland. The problem was whether shapes should let themselves be different colors, so there are different political factions on whether colorizing should be legal or not. A lot of the political speeches and arguments is actually similar to the things I’ve already heard of. I guess there is just constant war no matter what plane of reality. No matter how great the gods are. I love the animation. The creator obviously put in a lot of thought into how these worlds work. How the inhabitants of lineland, flatland, and spaceland feel and see themselves. That the flatlanders have Plus how they manage to explain the values they have to each other. Like, I was trying to visualize how flatlander’s saw with that lesson from the beginning of the film. And I completely understood how they tried to describe the dimensions to the other planes. All of this is just really fascinating, and you have to appreciate all the effort that was put into these concepts.

The 3D effects caught me off-guard, but it fits well. We got so used to the 2d shapes and lines, that the 3D world looked truly bizarre when it bled through. Well, the 3D effect looked bizarre regardless, but I think that was an intentional thing. It was still a world of basic shapes after all. Maybe the next stage are more complex 3D shapes like our world? There are still somethings that I’m still questioning. Or horrified. Like the hospital of shape reconfiguration. That horrified me. Like, how they use basically stapler looking things to reshape babies. Then how shapes can actually bleed and die. I mean sure, they are all just shapes, but that was pretty horrific.

I think that there’s a message here, like a grand message. But I, I’m not sure what I need to take away from this. Is it, the futility of war over irrelevant ideals/believes? Is it about the religious awakening and the possibility of something greater than yourself? Like, there is something here, but it isn’t something that I can instantly grasp. It’s like a modern version of the Allegory of the Cave, and I’m the person who just heard of it trying to conceptualize what is going on. I feel like it’s the type of movie that you really need to rewatch over and over to find out what the meaning is supposed to be. Or it’s like an abstract art piece, where sure the artist might have their view, but you can find your own meaning in there. It feels a bit complex, the longer I think about it, but in a good way. Overall: This is a great philosophical film to watch. Not only with points of war and politics, but also how you can explain concepts that people couldn’t even conceptualize. There is another movie called “Flatland the Movie” so I don’t really know the difference, but they are both available on youtube. Definitely check it out when you get the chance.