Gopo's Little Man
A Brief History (Scurta istorie) is a three-minute animated short film from Romania, directed by Ion Popescu-Gopo.
It is, essentially, a history of the universe in three minutes. After the Big Bang, which is caused by a fly buzzing around a woman dressed like Carmen Miranda (really), the film moves to Earth, where a brontosaurus is bounding around cheerfully. That brontosaurus knocks a monkey out of a tree, and the monkey turns into Homo sapiens.
The human seen in the movie is the first appearance of "Gopo's Little Man
", a sort of Everyman figure who would feature in eight short films by Popescu-Gopo over thirty years.
Tropes:
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: The Little Man's private area is quite smooth and featureless.
- Call-Back: A fly buzzing around the primordial mass of matter that is Carmen Miranda causes the primordial mass to sneeze; this is the Big Bang. Soon after, a buzzing fly causes a dinosaur to sneeze and then chase after the fly, which knocks a monkey out of a tree and creates the human race.
- Caused the Big Bang: A fly buzzing around Carmen Miranda causes her to sneeze, which creates the Big Bang.
- Fur Is Clothing: A pretty weird example of this. The Little Man ambushes a jaguar, then emerges from behind a tree wearing the jaguar's fur as clothing. Is the jaguar dead? No, it emerges from the tree, but now it's transparent.
- Hemisphere Bias: Naturally, when Earth appears on the screen, Europe is shown.
- Silence Is Golden: No dialogue, although the Little Man does sing (or rather vocalize) for a bit.
- Time-Passes Montage: Human history is represented by the Little Man riding an escalator up. As the Little Man goes up on the escalator, he changes to an Egyptian, a Greek, a Roman, a medieval knight in a suit of armor, and a Victorian gentleman, and a modern man
- Visual Pun: The opening shot of a ball in space turns into all the stars and planets of the cosmos, jumbled together...in a manner that looks just like Carmen Miranda wearing one of her famous fruit hats.
