''Owzat'' is a 1997 CGI short film created by Aardman Animations. The title is a shortened form of "How's that?", the traditional call used to request rulings from an umpire during a game of

cricket Cricket is a Bat-and-ball games, bat-and-ball game played between two Sports team, teams of eleven players on a cricket field, field, at the centre of which is a cricket pitch, pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two Bail (cr ...

Plot

Teams of

ghost In folklore, a ghost is the soul or Spirit (supernatural entity), spirit of a dead Human, person or non-human animal that is believed by some people to be able to appear to the living. In ghostlore, descriptions of ghosts vary widely, from a ...

s and skeletons gather in a church graveyard for a midnight game of cricket under a full moon. One skeleton batsman repeatedly hits the ball into the gravestones and monuments, damaging them and irritating the ghosts' bowler. After one hit flies into the belfry, striking the bell and sending it crashing to the ground, the ghosts confront the batsman with photographs of the damage he has caused. He ignores these and dares the ghosts to continue the game. When the next ball is bowled, the batsman knocks it into the weather vane mounted atop the belfry; it ricochets into the sky and shatters the moon as if it were a light bulb, leaving the graveyard in total darkness.

Production

The film's delivery format was Betacam SP. The CGI animating and modelling was done using Softimage 3D. The film was shown at the 1998 International Film Festival Rotterdam under the theme "exploding cinema", and the 1998 Holland International Film Festival under the theme "Nieuwe media".

Critical reception

IMDb IMDb, historically known as the Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and biograp ...

, Owzat received a rating of 5.2/10 from 105 users.

References

1997 films 1997 animated short films British animated short films 1990s ghost films Animated films without speech Cricket films 1997 computer-animated films Aardman Animations short films Fiction about skeletons 1990s English-language films 1990s British films English-language short films {{short-animation-film-stub