The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling

I would like to ask for five or six minutes of your time please. There is a wonderful stop motion animation short that you should watch right now called The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling. The story is very good and the animation quite simple. This is a great example for how like we have talked about in class that having great looking animation or “good” looking things isn’t always necessary. It really is the story and how it is told that matters not the look of it.

The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling follows the story of a man named Ivor. Ivor lived in an apartment in a tall building and one day he accidentally dropped one of his plant pots out the window. He watched as it smashed into many pieces on the ground far below. This frightened him and planted fear into his mind of falling out the window himself one day. Do to this event he makes a major life decision to move somewhere “safer” for his own sake.

This type of event occurred a few times, each different but with the same result of Ivor making a very drastic and rash decision. Fear is a powerful thing and can drive us to do many things. The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling does a very nice job in showing what humans will do once fear has entered their mind. We need to not be afraid to live life and understand that things happen around us, sometimes they are bad things but there are also good things and we will miss them if we are only focused on the bad.