The Hedgehog and Archie's Final Project (aka My Suicide)

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 this one did, and it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2009, almost five months before this one had its wide release in France. My Suicide couldn't have been inspired by even the book version of The Hedgehog, since in the book 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. This one 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. This one 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 this one was good. I thought My Suicide (shorter to type and better, anyway!) was quite a bit better. It's much edgier, and actually about suicidal people, whereas in this movie the planned suicide is pretty clearly an abstraction by an over-intellectualizing kid who doesn't quite understand the finality of death. Which is not to say that she was certain to not carry out her plan; just that the bar for her seeing the wrongness of her idea was quite a bit lower than it is for the characters in My Suicide.

The other significant difference was that this movie is more about Renee than Paloma, whereas Archie in the other movie is in essentially every scene.

They are both worth seeing.

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