Flower and Varmints - Seperated at birth?

Hi, Cajun Chicken here again, if you've ever looked at my profile page on N4G and read my comments, you might get the jist that I'm an animation student in my final year. This post is about the similarities of themes with an animation short and Flower for PS3. Read on if you adore what Flower contains artistically, in themes and music.

  In my animation course, I've been to some animation festivals as part of Uni trips, namely the little known (if you don't follow animation) Bradford Animation Festival and Anncey Animation Festival, I've been to Bradford twice and Anncey once.

-Now follows lots of video linkage between text, please view links, especially the link to the trailer of Varmints-

At my first year at Bradford, I discovered an animation agency called Studio AKA, which specialises in making animated adverts for the UK and Europe, such as the recent Lloyds TSB TV advertising campaign and a really happy, musical national lottery advert both of these adverts were directed by Studio AKAs jewel in the crown director Marc Craste.
 Like most advert based animation agencies, Studio AKA often make a film to show off to future potential clients to gain more 'advertising gigs', one of these films was 'JoJo in the Stars' (which reminded me of the dark dense feeling of the Oddworld games) and the next one was based on a book Marc Craste helped to illustrate for called 'Varmints'.
 Now after all that linkage, you are hopefully filled in, make sure you click on 'Varmints' above.

Now, this is where the point of this article begins. Straight after playing Flower, I instantly connected the style of artistic direction, music and overall feeling to a Studio AKA film and thats a great achievement for a videogame in my opinion.
 
-More linkage, pictures only-

To fill you in more, Varmints is a short film about a nature loving small male dog protaganist who loves the flowing fields of his homeland, when all of a sudden, varmints take over the world pulling buildings and large skyscrapers across the world and suddenly corrupt all nature into a dark, depressing city landscape full of pollution, just before the fields are corrupted and die the dog-like protaganist picks up the last remaining flower and waits for it to grow inside of his new flat he has been forced to get by following the 'rat race' of creatures constant, repetative, never changing, monotonous way of living. Creatures in the crowd around him die as he goes to work and clocks in and nobody notices.
 The story keeps on going to the flower which the protaganist has saved and placed on his windowsill, bit by bit the plant grows and the flowers petals leave, only to attach itself onto a building and grow into an odd etheral form.
 From this point, the growth from the building starts basically killing off the city and transforms into strange jelly fish beasts which destroy everything in their path covering with snow and petals.
 Sorry, one last video up there.^

Anyway, thats basically it. If you've played Flower, you'll like Varmints and I can't decide wherever Flower is inspired by Varmints or not, but Flower clearly shares themes with Varmints, but who really cares, as curious as I am about wherever Jenova Chen is a fan of Marc Craste, that doesn't depart from the fact that this is a game with the emotional depth of a film by Marc Craste and Studio AKA which have been voted up for numberous awards and shown internationally and in my view, thats IMPRESSIVE.
 If I go to Bradford this year after graduating from Uni and Marc Craste attends I will indeed cheekily ask (or inform) Mr. Craste of Flower, I'm sure he'll love it to bits.

Hope you've possibly enjoyed learning about Studio AKA and enjoy Flower folks, I doubt it we'll get spoilt and get anything like this again. Lets get a nice chat up here, maybe somebody else has had the fantastic fortune to of seen this short AND play Flower.