Archie's Final Project and The Hedgehog

There were not one but two films released in the U.S. in 2011 which featured a young person creating a video diary leading up to a planned suicide, and furthermore, both of them have animated sequences based on or as part of the young person's visual creations. How strange is that?

(And how strange is it that, in the course of seeing 165 films from 2011, I rented them from Netflix back-to-back and watched them two days apart, without knowing the connection?)

I believe My Suicide (a much better title) started filming before The Hedgehog did, and it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2009, almost five months before The Hedgehog had its wide release in France (it was based on a best-selling novel). My Suicide couldn't have been inspired by even the book version of The Hedgehog, since in the book the young girl, Paloma, is simply keeping a diary, not filming. Nor could the influence have gone the other way.

They both struggled to get a U.S. theatrical release. The Hedgehog opened on August 19, 2011, and maxed out at 60 theaters, while Archie's Final Project opened on September 23 in L.A. and NYC only, but apparently only in museums or the like, since BoxOfficeMojo has no record of it (and the only papers that reviewed it were the Times in both cities). It came out on DVD on December 6, 2011. The Hedghehog was available on disk as a Canadian import as far back as late 2010 and came out in the U.S. last June.

I thought The Hedghehog was good. I thought this one was quite a bit better. It's much edgier, and actually about suicidal people, whereas in The Hedgehog the planned suicide is pretty clearly an abstraction by an over-intellectualizing kid (Paloma is just 11) who doesn't quite understand the finality of death.

The other significant difference is that while Archie is in essentially every scene, The Hedgehog is actually a bit more about the super in the building Paloma lives in (she's the title character).

They are both worth seeing, and if you prefer sentiment to edge, you might like the other one better. But this is the one that haunts me as if it might have really happened.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.