*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 3:08am PST - promote requested by eric3579.

*quality animation

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by seltar.

Very good indeed - had a Pixar * quality to it!

Delightful ... and that "smoke" is my favorite colors!

Hmm. What was the point though? We're presented with a lead character who dupes a village and gets away with it. If there was a point / lesson to be learned, wouldn't the story have been told from the villagers point of view? Like "Don't trust the flashy fly by night who rolls into town dealing in magic"? I just don;t get the point of the story being told. Nice enough animation though.

I liked the twist ... didn't see it coming. I thought it was refreshing.

It's a child-friendly version of Needful Things, without the conflict and malice.

What twist? That the hoaxter's hoax turned out to be a hoax?

a guy dupes a bunch of people and gets away? sounds like allegory to something pretty obvious to me... religion? politics? maybe its just an animated film...

in case you missed it the point was Buyer Beware, pretty simple. Even the seller himself was an illusion...

Odd...the clothing and the town looked like they were from the 17th-18th century, but he was giving the kid airplanes and rockets to play with.

I asked someone with more knowledge in this area than I have, and the clothing looked like what you would expect from Spain around the time of the first world war. The toys look like they would date, at the earliest, from the 1920s or 1930s... the era of Buck Rogers style rocket ships.

The animation school where this film was made is in Valencia, in Spain, and maybe the students imagined a rural village from their grandparents' or great grandparents' era?

The travelling salesman trope, and it's implications, are as old as the hills. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TravelingSalesman

In that case shouldn't the narrative have been shown from the point of view of the village occupants? The closest we saw to them suffering any consequences of their actions was a distant puff of purple smoke as the Smoke Seller laughed.

If let the buyer beware was the point, then show me the buyers suffering the consequences. A massive guard dog turning into a mangy ankle-biter while defending his owner from a burgler, the boy's airplane / rocket turning back into a pointy stick and catching him in the eye, show me the old ladies at a fancy party being laughed at when their fancy bags and clothes turn back into tat, or the major becoming a laughing stock when, as he goes to unveil it to invited dignitaries, his massive monument tuns back into a walking cane (without even a jewel adorning it anymore).

Marketing & consumerism=easy prey.

Downvote.

The animation was pretty, but I'm all about storytelling, and the content wasn't even good for high school. Right from the beginning, what was the point of showing the showman as unable to get an audience? This had no effect later on, but it's half the show. Why weren't people impressed to begin with? Doesn't make sense. Why were they crying when he left? He didn't touch their hearts or improve their lives; he gave them things.

That's all meh. What really irked me was there's all sorts of clichéed assumptions made all the way through: all small dogs want to be big and/or male owners of small dogs want big dogs; children are unsatisfied merely imagining that sticks are airplanes; all women want to be big blonde princesses or to have fancy handbags, and all leaders want giant monuments built for them. Puh-leeze. It was less Needful Things than playing on tired stereotypes.

I especially didn't like the implication in the end that old bald people with bad backs are less trustworthy. I understand "ugly/old/bald" has been a common shorthand for "bad person" when there isn't enough time to develop a character properly, but inviting the audience to judge people based on their appearance is something I expect not to see in a modern production.