This is a very hard film to review. For my colleague the animation student, I guess watching it is a case of "How did they do that?" For myself the guy who took about seven units of Elizabethan drama at university, it was more a case of "ok, ok, which play is that.. and that.. and that one, and oh, that's... hell.. err.."

Basically it's an audition, at which a single actor, aided only by a dummy and some props, enacts at least one moment from each of Shakespeare's plays in the space of a few minutes, whilst a disinterested director watches. The animation quality is very good, and better than most of Aardman's other works from this era.

What keeps this back from four stars to me is that there is nothing to involve me emotionally. It may be technically astounding, and very very clever, but in the end I can't really bring myself to feel much more than admiration for it, and I need a bit more than that, even though I realise that emotional impact is especially hard to achieve in a short, short.

The DVD really blew things by getting the two guys who did the lighting, to do the commentary track. Frankly, who gives a toss about the lighting? Hearing the writer or director say "ok, and this is 'Twelfth Night', and here comes 'Henry IV part II' would have been much, much more entertaining than "yeah, this bit was really hard to light, and... so yeah, so was this bit."

To me, once you get past the cleverness of how it was made, there isn't much left. But hang it, there is so much cleverness I'll give it an extra half star anyway.

When I was in high school my video teacher had a tape of animated shorts which he would throw into the VCR whenever the class was getting bored. This short was one of the ones on that tape and it is, without a doubt, one of the most jaw-dropping piece of animation that I've ever seen. Watch it once and you'll understand why I've kept my eye out for it since high school and why I was so thrilled when I finally tracked it down--in name at least.

During the course of the five minute short, Shakespeare condenses all his plays into one amazing 'audition'. You watch the short and you think "Wow, that was incredible and fluid and whimsical and beautiful" and then you try to imagine what the animators would've had to do to create it, considering that it is stop motion, and at the point your brain goes into meltdown.

If you can find it, watch it--or better yet, tell me how to find it!