Even Pigeons Go to Heaven Short Film Review

A slick fast-talking priest is informed that an elderly miser may be on the verge of death. (The Church has a supernatural conduit to such information.) He hightails it over to the man's house, arriving just in time to save him from a nasty fall.

But the motive for his visit is not simply a benevolent, life-saving one. Instead, he proceeds to overwhelm him with salesman's rhetoric on the desirability of doing what he needs to do to reach Heaven, since, as should be more apparent than ever now, death could come at any time.

How does one get to Heaven? Well, it involves turning over all your money to the Church. In exchange, you receive a one-way ticket to Heaven on a phony spaceship-type thing.

The old man succumbs to the hard sell.

After the deal is completed and the priest prepares to leave with all the old man's money, Death arrives and kills him instead of the old man (though there's an indication that the old man will die momentarily as well).

This cartoon is stylistically enjoyable, I was moderately interested in the story most of the way, and the dialogue is clever and humorous. I didn't really see the point of the ending though. I mean, I assume the film as a whole is knocking the Catholic Church--or perhaps organized religion in general--for benefiting by exploiting people's fear of death, but what's it supposed to symbolize when the priest gets killed at the end? That organized religion is dying because of the bad things it does? That it's no big deal to get over on somebody, because you'll both die soon enough regardless?

Or more likely, there's no point at all to the ending. It's just supposed to be funny because it's an unexpected reversal, or it's supposed to make the viewer feel good because the bad guy gets his comeuppance.

The first ninety percent of this film is promising. The ending isn't terrible, but I would have preferred it flow more organically from what came before, rather than being tacked on as a surprise.