Ice Merchants is a 2022 animated short film (14 minutes) directed by João Gonzalez.
It is about a father and son that live in a house which hangs from a glacier, supported only by ropes that are tied to hooks that are drilled into the sheer ice cliff face. The house looks to be at least two thousand feet above the valley below. The boy sometimes swings on a swing that dangles from the house, with nothing below him but a long, long fall to the bottom. The only way down is by parachute, although a lift-and-pulley system can be used to get back up.
Why do father and son live in this terrifyingly unsafe house? Because they're ice merchants! Every day, the father fills a box with water. Every night, the water in the box freezes. Every morning, the father breaks the block of ice into pieces with a hammer. Then father and son jump off the house, parachute down to the town in the valley below, and sell their ice. Father and son keep losing their hats as they free-fall to earth, which means they keep having to buy new hats.
The little family makes a decent living selling ice, but the father seems to have forgotten about one thing: the coming of spring, and the inevitable thawing of the glacier.
Tropes:
- Brick Joke: The father and son survive their long, long fall from the ice cliff house, by landing on the enormous pile of hats, which they have created, one pair at a time, each time they would parachute jump and lose their hats.
- Cool House: It is horrifically unsafe. In fact it's completely insane to live there. But a house hanging from a glacier offers one hell of a view.
- Guardian Angel: It seems that the mother, who otherwise is entirely absent from the cartoon, is this. With the house about to come loose and send the father and son plunging to their deaths, the father takes the boy and jumps—and they go up. A woman who is presumably the mother appears, embracing them both. Then father and son are shown both alive, having landed on the giant pile of their lost hats.
- Idiot Ball: The father appears to be loving and attentive, but—a house hanging from the edge of a glacier, supported by nothing but ropes, and subject to falling out and plunging thousands of feet to the valley whenever it gets warm? Really?
- Job Title: The father and son are ice merchants.
- Match Cut: The camera shows the thermometer outside the house on yet another very cold day, with the little red ball of mercury sitting in the bottom of the thermometer. The film then cuts to the red ball of the sun, just rising on the other side of the valley. The temperatures will soon rise.
- Missing Mom: Played straight for most of the cartoon, with a father and son living together and no hint of where the mother might be, not even a picture. Averted in the end, when she does appear as the father and son are falling. Or her spirit appears.
- Running Gag: The caps. Father and son get a pair of winter caps. The caps come flying off their heads as they free-fall down to the valley before Dad pulls the ripcord on the parachute. Father and son get a new pair of winter caps. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
- Silence Is Golden: No dialogue in the cartoon.
- Single Tear: A single tear rolls down the boy's cheek as the ice melts, the ropes fray and start coming loose, and father and soon appeared doomed to their deaths.
- Time-Passes Montage: A montage shows the very strange daily routine of the father and son—cracking an ice block into chunks, parachuting down to the valley, selling the ice, winching their way back up the ice cliff, filling the box of water before bed, then repeating the process the next day.
