The Big Snit tells the cynically charming tale of a couple so tightly wound in a world of petty squabbling that they argue straight through the onset of World War Three. Animator Richard Condie makes use of minimal dialogue and entrancing exposition to tell this story praised for it's genius by fans and critics alike after it's release in 1986, when it won 16 International awards and was nominated for both an Oscar and a Genie.
The film begins with a maddening game of Scrabble between husband and wife. When the husband has trouble putting words together, the wife leaves to vacuum the bathroom from floor to ceiling. The husband falls asleep during an announcement by a radiated-skeleton of a newscaster that a nuclear war has begun. He does, however, wake in time to see the outside world in mayhem, but mistakes it for a passing parade. He then slides back over to the Scrabble board attempting to eye his wife's letters but is caught before the deed is done. Bickering soon ensues, and gradually swells, parallel to the madness outside their window, into an apocalypse of their own.
It is a quick glimpse at an old photograph of the couple in love that brings the husband to fond memories of the days when life was good and his eye-shaking wife did not annoy him. After a failed attempt to bring his wife to calm, the husband remembers a fool-proof way back into her heart, the accordion. And it is the husband's accordion serenade that finds these two lovers in bliss once again. And they step outside their front door, two souls holding hands together, unaware that the world has come to an end.
Hair with a mind of it's own, teeth with a slumber-time rattle, and eyes taken off to be shaken like a maraca, Condie imaginatively captures the surreal idiosyncrasies of a couple that are part of a very true to life tale - Two people so deeply involved in their shared world that they fail to recognize the one outside.
1997 © Animation World Network
