Franz Kafka's "A Country Doctor" Animation by Koji Yamamura

Found this the other day when I was watching some shows on Hulu. There is a button at the bottom of the viewer to turn on the close captions if they are not already on (the voices are in Japanese). Please be patient, the movie will be interrupted with an advertisement once or twice.

I was really impressed with the animation. The use of distortion and exaggeration to express different aspects of experiencing surreality and psychological anguish. I drew a straightforward message from this story; passivity and blaming others for your problems will leave you naked and in the cold.

This is one of Kafka's stories considered to be substantiating existentialism (The Metamorphosis being the more famed one).

"A Country Doctor" comments on man, who, buffeted by the scheme of things, is unable to transcend the part assigned him by the absurdity of that existence. Because he does not lack conscious knowledge of his condition, but refuses to act in the face of his portentous freedom, the doctor, an archetype of the anti-existential hero, deserves his fate. Lacking the human stuff necessary to create and structure situations, he permits himself to be manipulated by the groom, the family, and the horses; but he becomes, by submitting, a tool within the situations they create. Never, consciously, does he attempt through an overt act, until too late, to establish his own essence, to rise above any manipulative value he possesses for others. As doctor he is a thing, an object, a tool; as man he is nothing."

Louis H. Leiter

Anyways, philosophy aside, its a very interesting short movie. Check it out and let me know what you think.