His first film, "Six Shooter," recently won the Oscar for best live-action short, which would be meaningless if the film weren't so eloquent and comic, shaped by a sophisticated cinematic imagination.
Yiddish-inflected New York culture and an immersion in comics shaped his future.
A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason…" And all the while of course, while he drinks and thinks, the murder he is born to avenge takes slightly comic external shape.
The four-color, six-panel comic strip shaped Patricia Highsmith the crime writer like nothing else — however much she cared to cite Dostoyevsky and Henry James.
They divide and reform in choreography of exhilarating inventiveness: a solo of staccato footwork that slashes and slices the ice, kaleidoscopic configurations in which limbs and bodies are angled into comic, impossible shapes.
For its first cast the company offers youthful exuberance to superb effect: Lisette Oropesa has a lovely, flexible voice and the comic instincts to shape Susanna perfectly, and Erwin Schrott, a Uruguayan bass, matches and at times surpasses those qualities in his portrayal of Figaro.
What if a comic museum was shaped like a cluster of enormous concrete speech bubbles?
Usually, however, a truly successful sitcom requires its star to have a strong comic identity that shapes the humor and adds an original overlay to a familiar format.
