This short was nominated for an Oscar for Animated Short. There will be spoilers: This short starts out with the titular character standing on a train station platform with all the baggage of a human life with her. She suddenly winds up on board a train with said baggage in the strangest train compartment possible. Robert Bloch would be impressed. A strange chess game and the creepiest tennis player ever round out the background to Madame's journey into a nightmare.Madame recovers from an enforced "sleep" to find herself in an otherwise empty compartment after having a "dream" or "nightmare" which may or may not have been imagined. She winds up out in the corridor and goes deeper into the strangeness. Ultimately, this leads to a fascinating and visually beautiful, if predictable ending.This has given me more than a few shudders and is rather creepy but is also visually fascinating and exceptional in its detail. The plot is relatively simple and a bit obvious in spots. But it's an excellent example of stop motion animation and very memorable.A production of the National Film Board of Canada, this short is well worth watching and most recommended.

Clyde Henry Productions spent a considerable 5 years to make this short film. In the day and nights they worked, they cannot avoid the question of what message they want to deliver. Even if they chose to leave it open, they had enough time to ponder about it.I think the message is the acceptance of death.Our protagonist Madame Tutli-Putli, is dead already, when she boards the train. Why she doesn't instead board a ferry across the Rivers Styx? Because all these, Styx, ferry, are abstract, and subject to personal interpretation. The Greeks who invented the ferry on Styx do so because they live with rivers and ferries. A modern Canadian should take a train, as they are used to. A China man took the Helpless bridge 奈何桥 over the Yellow Spring (黄泉), accordingly. They just go through this phase in the way they are most familiar with.Let's look at the two man playing chess. When should someone be wrapped in a case and delivered to some other place? Mail-order bride does not happen often; the usual case is delivery of bone ashes. So they are both dead, too. The chess game can be a picture of their lives: their is a loser and there is a winner, but they failed to do any meaningful move. The destiny decides. The child died with deep grudge against his enemy; we can only guess what happened.Madame Tutli-Putli cannot leave her past behind. People like her would have her memory purged by force after-death. In typical Chinese myth the instrument for this is a bow of nepenthe soup (孟婆湯). I am guessing every culture has their instruments. And in the film, that nepenthe is a poisoned yellow gas.She saw it coming, as she see the train stops in some lifeless woods. The Chinese equivalent is a small tavern on the road to the Yellow Spring, where dead travellers sit and sign before they drink the soup that purges their memory: in the very tavern they were told that nothing they can carry on the road onward. This is what happened in the movie: Tutli-Putli tried to write something, but soon the gas fills the train and she loses every possession. We even don't know the name of her beloved, whom she is trying to address. The struggle to carry possessions and names on board was a struggle in vain.In the moment the poison purges memory, she sees the memory of others, perhaps because the gas takes away the memory of everyone and they were mixed. She sees that the man sitting opposite to her died and someone took his organs. He died a miserable death and she is frightened.Waking up with all memories lost, she run aimlessly towards the light, feeling sorry that she is an empty body with no past. She eventually throw herself into a light, and thus embraced death.She was alone when she run towards the light. Where is every other dead person? My guess is they are gone before her, and she is the last to obtain rebirth. Her burden was the greatest. Her departure with her past particularly more difficult.What does the film say? Modern technology and superior condition of life made people live longer, but it also makes the acceptance of death more difficult. In the past, men don't decide to die. You don't go through acceptance of death, you simply die. Instead of finding death, death finds you and fall upon you. By 2007, when the movie produced, things are much more different. Men are more likely to die of cancer, which is a failure of own facility. Unlike other diseases that were boldly challenged and conquered, in this game you can fight, but you probably won't win (the chess scene). To let the audience have a look of what will happen, how should it happen, relieves you from the horror of death, which possesses you ever since you get old. To the less rapt audience, the film is rich of techniques that keeps you focused. It wins all kinds of audiences.

Directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, "Madame Tutli-Putli" is a somewhat groundbreaking stop-motion animation. The macabre film, which reportedly took over five years to produce, revolves around Madame Tutli-Putli, a frail looking woman who boards a midnight train. She's shown carrying a lot of extra baggage, both physical and psychological, the latter of which may or may not play a part in the bizarre nightmare which she experiences during her midnight journey. It's a nightmare rife with strange sights, grotesque visions and a plot in which freakish train robbers sneak aboard the train, cut open a man's stomach and steals his kidneys. Whether these events are really happening, are a nightmare, or are manifestations of the woman's warped personality – her misreading of real but far less sinister events – is left entirely up to the audience. Figuring out exactly what's going on is part of the film's charm.It's technique rather than content which elevates "Madame Tutli-Putli", though. The directors, for example, used composited human eyes, which lend their characters a creepy, life-like quality. More jaw dropping is the film's second half, which essentially invents a kind of stop-motion "shaky-cam". Stop-motion, of course, is usually a rigid affair, with stiff camera work. But here the film-makers have recreated an extremely free-form, almost cinema-verite quality. This must have been a nightmare to shoot, Szczerbowski's camera needing constant micro set-ups and micro adjustments. No wonder the film took five years to create. Harryhausen and Aardman never attempted anything quite like this.8/10 – Worth one viewing.

Writer director Lavis is just another of the neo-Nazis who get financial backing to produce this kind of garbage. He isn't a bit subtle about his vision of the dead brunette.She has to leave behind all her possessions as a train picks her up into the next life, and nearly every scene shows her in what appears to be a coffin. She sees poisonous gas and ghouls, and constantly is in the coffin. Lavis just goes overboard with Hitler idealism. Some hacks believe their desire to depress people makes them artists, but it doesn't. It only makes them one of the countless rich brats with no artistic ability whatsoever.Easily the worst animated short ever.