This is a story, which takes place in the underground layer, full of enchantment and playful designs with bright colours. Onnie The Witch is the protagonist character of the story. Onnie is someone who is born of African descent and who was raised by a handful of powerful witches in New Orleans. She should be someone obsessed with making magic spells and putting curses on folks. Maybe she should be someone riding brooms in the night while talking to cats and the dead? For some apparent reason, this witch is obsessed with making magical soup.
In the animated short film, Onnie is prancing and dancing on her way down a long corridor towards a cave entrance. As soon as the witch gets there, she is distracted by a fly gliding into the scene in front of her. She swings her big ladle in front of it, and the fly decides to disappear. Everything seems well, so she proceeds to go to the big cauldron filled with a green substance over a big fire. I’m guessing this is the first introduction to her magical soup. Onnie smiles and begins to stir her magical soup with her big ladle. In the scene, I could tell she was very pleased and content.
When the witch finally starts to relax and begins to move in some dancing motion, while stirring her soup, all of a sudden, a variety of insects start flying on the screen and bothering her while she’s cooking her soup. Onnie was so irritated that she began to get angry and swing her ladle right into the air. When the movie goes off, you can hear Onnie screaming out the titular words more than once “Keep the bugs out of my soup!!!”
The film animation ends with some cool graphics along with a spider coming down on the web trying to get into Onnie’s soup. She wasn’t having it, so she smashed the spider with a flyswatter. While the closing credits appear on the screen, there were also some cool animations of Onnie being in different poses while making remarkable facial expressions. One of my negatives for the film is, I wish it was longer because I enjoy the concept, but I know it could be taken further. I also would like to see more characters that Onnie could’ve interacted with.
The concept was originally inspired by a video game idea. Tyrone Evans Clark, who some people know as Tyy Renaissance, is the creator of this animated production. Clark was the producer, writer, concept artist, director, and he also did the voice-over work for the character, Onnie. All the animation was created by one of the original Walt Disney animators, Rey Morano. This animated film also gathered some accolades, such as being an official selection for the 2022 Sidewalk Film Festival – Animated Short and an official selection for the 2022 Prague Independent Film Festival – Animated film.
My hat goes off to Clark for creating this beautiful animation that stars a cartoon who is African-American. There are not enough black and brown cartoons out there for children to look up to. We need more cartoons that display all colours in a positive way. I feel personally that Onnie The Witch is adorable, and I can see children falling for this character. It low-key gives me a classic introduction for example, a Mickey Mouse character or somebody from his universe.
Self-contained fable Birth Of The Oases (Marion Jamault, France, 9 mins) is a near-perfect portrayal of a symbiotic relationship. The cold-blooded hilltop snake struggles to keep warm while the two-humped camel is constantly exhausted by the desert’s heat. They come to a mutually helpful agreement whereby the cold snake takes up residence on the camel’s humps. This warms up the snake and cools down the camel. After the camel dies from old age, the snake moves around the sand dunes – here designed to look like a never ending series of camels humps – to create first water and later full blown oases which, according to the armadillo revealed as the narrator at the very end, to this very day.
In the black and white classroom of the black and white world of The Boy And The Elephant (Sonia Gerbeaud, France, 7 mins), black and white kids taunt someone who is different – a boy with an elephant head who is coloured blue. One kid, though, takes an interest – a boy who is coloured red, and the two embark on a playground friendship which could be read as a gay relationship, a state threatened by the red boy’s need to conform and revert to fit in with the black and whites. Eventually, a black and white girl takes pity on the elephant head, accepts him and he is subsumed into the group.
Marea (Guilia Martinelli, Switzerland, 5 mins) is another self-contained fable about a family living on an island within an hermetically sealed dome.
Stop-frame marvel Laika & Nemo (Jan Gaderman/Sebastian Gadow, Germany, 15 mins), arguably my favourite film in the programme, again concerns an outsider – a boy who lives in a lighthouse who is regularly tormented by fellow pupils and local fishermen at the harbour for wearing deep sea diving gear. When an astronaut crashes his spaceship near the lighthouse, the two helmet-wearers bond which puts them in a good place for when one of those local fishermen drops a key into the harbour.
Last but not least, The Queen Of The Foxes (Marina Rosset, Switzerland, 9 mins) is a French tale about the saddest member of a group of foxes who is, perhaps for that reason, made their queen. The other foxes’ inability to write hampers their attempts at writing such a letter to cheer her up. Instead, they steal from the nearby town all the love letters people have never been brave enough to send, delivering one which results in the uniting of a happy human couple who write their own letter to the fox queen thanking her for their efforts, which finally does the trick. The foxes then deliver the other letters, and the town windows suddenly become full of lively couples, straight, gay, even a threesome.
Which goes to show that programmes of kids animation can be a lot dirtier than you might expect.
The third of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
One of two hungry mice becomes trapped inside a large, circular cheese in Mouse House (Timon Leder, Slovenia/Croatia, 9 mins) and is able to gorge himself inside while his companion struggles unsuccessfully, stomach rumbling, to transport the cheese. Meanwhile, a cat prowls around. The cat is peripheral: this is not so much a game of cat and mouse as of mouse and cheese.
The deceptively simple plot of The Turnip (Piret Sigus/Silja Saarepuu, Estonia, 7 mins) involves the planting and the subsequent, less than successful pulling up of that vegetable. The human villagers are represented, often as close ups of feet, in relief, cut-out animation, that is to say somewhere between 2D and 3D, a technique heightened in the lengthy sequences of centipedes and other bugs under the earth interacting with the turnip prior to its extraction.
The lively visuals of Away From Home (Brunella De Cola, Italy, 6 mins) convey the idea of Africans wanting it to snow in Africa.
Letters From The Edge Of The Forest (Jelena Droz, Croatia, 12 mins) adopts the time-worn setting of a bunch of forest animals to question such prevalent values as selfishness and greed. When a squirrel proposes to write a letter, a visit to local owl sees the latter make it very clear that he, and only he, can perform this service. But eventually, he is talked round to the idea that if he were able to help other animals write letters free of charge, it would be a good thing for everybody.
The anthropomorphised crocodile of Lost Brain (Isabelle Favez, Switzerland, 7 mins) gets ill and stays home after getting caught in the rain outside. Thus, her world is turned into black and white with areas covered by inkblots. Suddenly, she is no longer able to find the key to open her front door. After venturing into such curiously satisfying visual conceits as a lampshade becoming a toaster, a tear falls on a piano key and she starts to compose music, which turns out to be part of her route out of her predicament. She is later seen in a park where trees resemble musical notes.
The second of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
After her village is damaged by a huge, falling rock, and after being tucked into bed by her mum, Luce goes out and befriends the giant, sentient rock, the pair helping one another out of scrapes in a series of scenarios. The night scenes in Luce And The Rock (Britt Raes, Belgium/France/Netherlands, 13 mins) are stunningly designed in a palette of yellow (for the girl) and blue (for the rock). In the morning, however, other people are horrified to discover she’s befriended the monster until Luce demonstrates that the feared outsider may sometimes have something unexpected and valuable to contribute.
Giuseppe (Isabelle Favez, Switzerland, 26 mins) is a hedgehog whose favourite storybook concerns the Ghost Of Winter who carries off any hedgehogs foolish enough to be out and about in Winter rather than hibernating. However, his friends the rabbits tell him that Winter is the best season, so he resolves to see some of it for himself. This is a fiendishly clever script that plays on animal behaviour (hedgehogs hibernate) to talk about how society conditions children via half-truths.
I’m Not Afraid (Marita Mayer, Germany/Norway, 7 mins) explores brother and sister relationships as a boy plays at being a fearless tiger. His elder sister, however, would much rather talk about comics with her disabled friend, who gets around on crutches, and she tricks him into a game of hide and seek in an attempt for her and her friend to get some peace and quiet. It’s high on visual style and you can’t really imagine it having quite the same impact had it been made live action.
The first of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs from Friday, 11th November to Friday, 25th November. Watch a trailer for Luce and the Rock below:
Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini. Winston Churchill. Joseph Stalin. Between them they were responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people, before, during and after WW2. Great men in the traditional sense, casting a wide influence over Europe that persists until this day. If you put them all through a live-action Dall-E generator and had them talk to one another, you might have something approximating Fairytale, the latest film from legendary Russian director Alexander Sokurov.
This hybrid live-action/animated film — somewhere between the compositing tricks of Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) and Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983), the uncanny valley of the deepfake WOMBO app and the foggy mysticism of Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein, 1975) — is a strange, philosophical wandering through the minds of the 20th century’s most influential and evil men. Equal parts fascinating and beguiling, frustrating and ponderous, it shows Sokurov is still a director unafraid to innovate while moving into the late period of his career.
It begins with Stalin waking up in a black-and-white nether-zone, next to none other than Jesus Christ himself. God’s own son lies in a somnambulant posture, unable to get up. One suspects he took a look at the world after the Second World War and believed a long lie-down was necessary. Stalin instantly tells him to get up, making a nebulous comparison between Christianity and communism. It’s the first of many one-line statements in a film jam-packed with odd aphorisms. Don’t expect genuine insight, but a sustained mood — a universe that is uncanny and provocative, asking the viewer to bring their own feelings to the world Sokurov creates.
Using archive footage of these dictators and placing them in a composited landscape that feels equal parts William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch, we are treated to a world that moves in endless circles. Dante and the opening lines of the Inferno are invoked — as well as the deep dark wood his protagonist finds himself in — but his Purgatorio feels like the bigger influence here, a world where forward or backward movement seems impossible, characters locked in an endless stasis. These men wait and wait for God to provide judgement, seeing if they finally make it into heaven or hell. They make their case in oblique ways, often talking past each other and wearing different uniforms, realising the kind of odd “what-if” situation you never knew you wanted.
The inclusion of Winston Churchill might be puzzling to certain Brits, due to the fact that he helped win the war and is considered a legend by most in the nation, but when you actually reckon with his vile white supremacism — condemned at the time by members of his own party! — and the legacy of the Bengali famine, his inclusion in the film amongst these tyrants does feel warranted. Either way, his British stoicism and endless pining for the Queen — remarkably still alive — provide a neat and humorous counterpoint to the ramblings of his fascist and communist contemporaries. Interestingly, no Americans feature, Sokurov keeping his perspective fully on the European perspective.
Conceived before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are echoes of modern times throughout. Boris Johnson failed to capture Churchill’s brio, while Vladimir Putin is bringing back the Stalinist era. There is always a problem when the man becomes a symbol of the nation itself, and pursues more and more depraved imperialist goals in the pursuit of endless power. It’s interesting that the masses themselves never seem to fully come into view, morphing together into shadows and waves and making lots of noise while lacking definition. It shows that dictatorial ambition, regardless of political affiliation, only works by seeing the people as a mass, never as individuals, despite the need for a god-like figurehead at the top. But there is only one God, and he has the power to decide everyone’s ultimate fate.
Rejected by Cannes for misguided political reasons — after all, simply being Russian is not a crime — Fairytale is too bizarre to resonate with viewers around the world, but for those interested in WW2 history and the legacy of great men, as well as films that pursue unique cinematic forms, this is certainly a film worth checking out.
Fairytale plays in the Concorso Internazionale as part of the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.
In the leafy-green part of Berlin where I live, near the Grunewald forest, lie many boars. For many months I might not see one, but when they do arrive, the provide a magnificent sight: great, big monsters that could cause some serious damage. If they organised in big numbers, perhaps they might even be able to take over my entire area.
In Everything Will Be Ok, the latest film by Cambodian experimental documentarian Rithy Panh, a boar lies at the head of society and human existence is in a woeful state. The Parthenon is in (further) ruins, Stonehenge has collapsed, and the Statue of Liberty has been torn down by an assortment of pigs, dogs, elephants and bears. They are not CGI-animated, but created through miniatures, the camera panning between their still, handmade visages accompanied by the surround sound of grunts, barks and guffaws.
Mankind, meanwhile, have been enslaved by the animals, taking revenge for the awful things they have done; in his trademark style, Rithy Pan splits the screen into six parts, showing us factory footage of animals being killed and minced for meat on an industrial scale. These are not the only horrors of the twentieth century, these miniature, unmoving animals watching the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot on the big screen. These images of history intermix with classic cinema — Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and King Kong (1933) — with the animals perhaps unable to tell the difference between history as it happens and popular culture.
This is accompanied by French narration which, typical of the language’s philosophers, provides semi-profound sweeping statement after semi-profound sweeping statement. While the animation is effective — which cannot really be called stop-motion as there is no actually movement of these figurines — and the documentary footage well-researched, I found little insight into the sweep of history and the nature of tyranny.
The final result is as if Adam Curtis directed Animal Farm, a portentous, skilfully edited deep-dive into difficult topics that lacks the former director’s penchant for specificity in favour at just vague gestures at all this. I loved the animation, but think it would’ve been better as a focused short film, while the archive montages go on and on, with typical Nazi and Khmer footage general pointers of atrocity seemingly divorced from context or analysis. While Panh has previously explored these controversies in detail, it felt a little scant on the ground this time around, and at worst, a little cheap and easy. There were so many ways for the film to go, but it felt more like a highly theoretical university lecture rather than a piece of accessible filmmaking.
One topical detail: the enslaved people wear face-masks. With no mention of any kind of virus, the film seems to make fun of how the piece of cloth has transcended its conventional trappings to be a vague symbol of conformity. A controversial statement to make when the pandemic is still sadly very well going-on, but perhaps the most provoking, especially while having to wear one while watching the movie myself. Once the pandemic is fully manageable, it will be telling which countries stick to their mask mandates and why.
Everything Will Be Ok plays in Competition at the 72nd Berlinale, running from 10-20th February.
A fascinating jumble of images exploring the extremity and isolation of existence, Dozens of Norths is the long-awaited and unique first feature from from legendary independent Japanese animator Koji Yamamura. Don’t expect traditional Japanese anime here: this is someone who has been blazing their own path outside of the studio system with short works for decades. Displaying an amazing sense of craft as well as a fine eye for striking, bizarre images, this is easily one of the standout films of the first feature competition.
The film opens on a series of world maps. They all point towards the area around the north pole, known for its dark nights, hardy people and cold weather. Yamamura presents the film as a series of unconnected and random fragments, a useful conceit as the movie explores the literal concept of meaningless. Don’t watch this if you’re in a bad mood, hungover or even drank too much coffee.
It feels purposefully like a dream, showing an author falling asleep and two smaller men walking away with his quill like arctic explorers. These are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the piece, guiding us through a hellish landscape that feels inspired by both Dante and Kafka in its depiction of sadness and depravity. There is a man attached to a dying animal lingering on the edge of a cliff; a man suspended upside-down by a tiny thread, trapped by his own subconscious; a women’s head that’s also a construction site; and hordes of people engaged in tasks with no meaning at all. And like Dante’s Inferno, the world we see is horrific, but is is presented with great beauty; hand-drawn animation that is busy with off-kilter design, oddball character lines and a a real sense of the void.
Text periodically appears on the screen like small poems, featuring aphorisms like “anxiety erodes you”. With no dialogue in the film, you read it as much as you watch it, creating a poetic, silent movie feel. This is complemented by the through-composed music, which has elements of Beatles producer George Martin’s work, as well as New Orleans jazz and atmospheric sound design. You could easily imagine this work presented with a live performance. It all makes for an unsettling experience, but a steadily enjoyable one nonetheless. I’m just glad it was under 70 minutes. Any longer and the really dark thoughts might have come my way.
As well as genuine existentialism, the other message seems to be the alienation of existence under capitalism, especially the part where people are working constantly on a task despite never having met the manager. If we are walking through hell, then that presumes there is also a heaven; someone else having the time of their life at your expense. But release in a conventional sense doesn’t arrive, Yamumura opting for image over narrative every time. The result is one of the boldest animated features I’ve seen in a while, a journey through an animation world worthy of inclusion alongside the likes of Pixar, Hertzfeld and Miyazaki.
Dozens of Norths plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.
I‘ve pre-booked a ticket for the Zoo in a couple of days. I would never normally go but there’s basically nothing else open these days. Now after watching Cryptozoo — a reverie on mankind’s relationship with exotic animals refracted through the acid trip imagination of the ambitious cartoonist Dash Shaw — I’m going to look at those pandas rather definitely.
Cryptos, misunderstood by the world around them, are mythological creatures living in hiding that span everything from your usual standards like Unicorns and Centaurs, to legendary folkloric animals from countries like Poland, Russia and Japan. This might like the plot for a lame X-Men movie, but Cryptozoo has a far more mature sensibility, opening with two young, horny and very naked adults finding themselves at the wrong end of an angry animal.
Based on the initial scene and early audience reactions on Twitter overplaying the timid sex scenes, you might be forgiven for thinking this is a slice of bizarro arthouse smut, but Cryptozoo actually has far more lofty aspirations. They two horny adults have stumbled into the eponymous zoo itself, a place where, apparently, the cryptos can finally be free from those who want to use their power as bio-military weapons. Fighting against these nefarious elements is army brat Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), who seemingly survives the trauma of growing up in post-WW2 Okinawa, Japan thanks to a cute, purple and blue creature called a Baku that eats her dreams. But this initial black-and-white perspective is complicated once we come to the Cryptozoo, which offers the animals a safe haven in return for providing visiting humans a tourist attraction.
Shaw, in collaboration with animation director Jane Samborski and lead animator Emily Wolver, creates a fantastic world ablaze with colour and ancient elements, where humans and cryptos could live in peace, if only they had the chance. But like Tiger King last year, which pitted big cat exploiter Joe Exotic against “sanctuary” owner Caroline Baskin, Cryptozoo asks the key question: is there any real difference between zookeepers and those they claim to fight against? Or are we all doomed in a world where one cannot survive without making profit?
With Jurassic Park never too far from the back of our minds, Cyptozoo invigorates disaster movie convention with its original style of animation. While the trope of the “gentle-creature-that-only-attacks-when-it’s-wounded” has been done to death over the past few years — most notably, and most confusedly, in the terrible Godzilla: King of the Monsters — Cryptozoo makes it feel fresh through sheer visual panache alone. In fact, the images are so arresting, one only realises how conventional the structure of the film is right at the very end.
As I’m so used to watching animated movies made within the parameters of a certain house style, so even their most glorious sequences seemed sanded-down to fit within the overall aesthetic, it’s glorious to watch something as diverse as this, a strange collage of styles that seems to run the entire gamut of 20th century drawing. While the flat 2D planes can feel a little off-putting, especially when watching otherwise unmoving characters’ mouths move, there is so much to love once you get over the initial strangeness. Zoos will never look quite the same again.
Cryptozoo plays in the Generation programme at Berlinale, running digitally from 1st to 5th March.
How do you sell a fragrance in movies? Moving pictures have occasionally dabbled with sense of smell over the years. At the tackier end of the market is so-called ‘scratch and sniff’ technology, famously exploited by US schlockmeister John Waters to film Polyester (1981) in ‘Odorama’. European director Tom Tykwer made a film about fragrances with his arthouse crime movie Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (2006) in which the central character is blessed with a superb olfactory sense and spends his life searching for the ultimate scent.
And then there are the Brothers Quay whose short film Wonderwood (2010) is ostensibly a commissioned ad for Comme des Garçons’ eponymous fragrance but to all intents and purposes a bona fide Quay Brothers short that sits happily with their wider body of work.
Although they’ve made two live action feature films – Institute Benjaminta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) and The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes (2005) – the Quay Brothers are best known for their numerous short films. Essentially made using stop-motion animation, these are a far cry from the character-driven films that generally characterise that medium (think: Nick Park’s Wallace And Gromit films or, going further back, the animated beasts and mythical creatures that populate the live action special effects films of Ray Harryhausen such as Jason And The Argonauts, 1963).
Exploring character through animation isn’t really the Quays’ thing; their interest lies in taking the viewer into strange, dark and magical environments. In The Cabinet Of Jan Švankmajer (1984; pictured below; originally commissioned as sizeable inserts for a documentary about the eponymous Czech surrealist and animator) they animate a feather quill dancing around on its nib point like a skater on ice and a four section, folding wooden ruler rotating a map of Praha (Prague) as if the ruler were a pair of arms belonging to an unseen reader of the map.
Elsewhere the same film also features a doll child laying his head on a table so that when his wig comes off to reveal an empty cranium, all its contents – a series of objects including stuffing, a comb and a simple toy motorbike – can be examined by a mechanical figure representing the inquisitive Švankmajer. The twins’ imagery isn’t macabre, exactly, but there is about it a definite dark edge.
Street Of Crocodiles (1986; pictured at the bottom) may well be their highest profile short. Back in the 1980s it played London cinemas as support to a feature film which is today forgotten in the mists of time. Spittle from the lips of a live action actor’s sets in motion a system of pulleys and mechanisms while the actor cuts a thread with an ancient pair of scissors to release a tailcoat-clad puppet into a rundown and threatening, off-coloured, urban world.
It’s a place where screws reverse out of the ground and wilfully roll away picking up the dust as they go and pocket watches open to reveal themselves as containers of raw red meat. Both a sense of physical corruption and decay and an undeniable Eastern European sensibility pervade the whole thing, as they do all their films.
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Crossing the pond
The Quay twins grew up in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a town near Philadelphia with a large European immigrant population. Their resultant interest in European culture was boosted at Philadelphia’s College of the Arts where Stephen studied film and Timothy illustration. Here they were exposed to the world of Polish poster art in general and the work of Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk in particular.
Just as these two Polish artists used that medium as a springboard to animated filmmaking (and, in the case of Borowczyk, live action), so did the US-born Quays by way of London’s prestigious Royal College Of Art. Other influences, all European, included writers Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser, composers Leszek Jankowski, Zdeněk Liška and Karlheinz Stockhausen, artists Giuseppe Archimbaldo and Honoré & Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and animators Wladislaw Starewich and the aforementioned Jan Švankmajer.
Despite the twins’ protests that their artistic sensibilities were pretty much fully formed by the time they discovered Švankmajer in the early 1980s, he is probably the artist with which more than any other they’re most readily associated.
Towards the end of the 1970s following a brief period of living in the Netherlands, the Quays joined with former fellow RCA student Keith Griffiths who has continuously acted as their producer under his Koninck Studios banner ever since, with the Brothers setting up and operating out of their studio production space in Southwark, London.
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The world of publicity
This was the latter part of the British commercials boom that aided the early careers of film directors Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott and others. To pay the rent and allow them to make their more personal short films, the Quays too took on commercials work, chalking up such clients as Doritos, Dulux Wood Protection, Fox Sports, Honeywell, ICI, Murphy’s Instant Stout, Nikon, Rice Krispies, Walkers Crisps and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Alongside Bristol’s Aardman Animations, they also contributed a section to the widely-seen pop video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer.
Ad agencies who commission commercials on behalf of clients usually take a fairly hands-on approach to film production companies, with imagery locked down at script and/or storyboard stage to make sure the client is happy with what they’re getting. Recognising the twins’ highly idiosyncratic, creative leanings, Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe of Comme des Garçons opted for a very different tack. In 2010, prior to launching Wonderwood, a new fragrance for men which featured among other things sandalwood, Virginia cedar and cypress, they contacted the Quays to make a commercial for the fragrance. The brief was – well, you know about the kingdom of wood… run with it. Unsurprisingly, the twins took up this generous offer since it basically commissioned them to make a Quay Brothers short.
As part of their daily production ritual, the brothers sprayed and walked into the perfume to get a feel of what it was about. Further inspiration came from past or present pieces of wood some of which they’d kept under their beds for the best part of a quarter of a century. If there was a kingdom of wood, the issue then was, how should they approach it?
The brothers fell back on the well-worn cinematic device of the observer or onlooker who looks through a peephole to access a mysterious, secret world. Because their filmic medium is stop-frame animation, that means the character had to be a three-dimensional stop-motion puppet. All we ever see of him, however, is his eyes and nose and occasionally his mouth cropped by the edge of frame, his head sometimes moving before we’ve even got a good look at those facial features (although we do momentarily see the full face a couple of times, including right at the end of the film).
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Smells of secret spirit
This observer figure is never more than that: there is no attempt whatsoever to develop him as a character: he’s no more than a furtive, barely glimpsed presence – and only a face at that. However, since he represents us, the viewer, this person looking at the strange world and wanting to know more about the scents associated with it, he scarcely needs to be any more than that. The real show is elsewhere, in the forest itself.
The mysterious, secret world of the forest is itself to all intents and purposes a character. The term ‘forest’ is misleading, for the viewed environment is broken up into various smaller sections by the twins’ mise-en-scène.
A sheet of cloth is pulled back as if by invisible hands to reveal a surface strewn with pinecones out of which grow strong, green plant forms. A strangely curved, four-sided frame contains patterns that move away like theatrical curtains to reveal fruits, pinecone stems topped by rounded cones like an all-wooden equivalent of a tree complete with full-blown foliage. The segmented surfaces of the cones undulate as the images are manipulated via some sort of visual trickery. Red and cream coloured, lengthy forms fall through dark space to land on an area like leafless tree stumps shorn of branches covering a patch of ground.
Those familiar with the work of Czech Surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer will recognise a borrowed editing trope. In many of his shorts, Švankmajer will show rapid fire, serial close-ups of an object such as, say, a piece of hessian to both give an impression of that object and make its presence felt within the filmic flow. In Wonderwood, the Quays treat the flat elements functioning like a screen within the curved, four-sided frame in much the same way.
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Unorthodox format
It’s tempting to use the word ‘narrative’ rather than flow, but like those of the Quays Švankmajer’s films themselves sometimes deal in non-narrative episodes and/or ideas. That said, the Quays’ films often have about them the element of the wilfully obscure, an element in which they seem to take a perverse delight, far more so than the rather more narratively-inclined Švankmajer.
Around the upright pine cone constructed ‘trees’ and other vegetation hover birds somewhere between a hummingbird with its hovering motion and a woodpecker with its beak periodically hammering repeatedly into wood to make segments fall to the ground below, the hammering reinforced on the soundtrack by rat-tat-tat-tat-tat rhythms in composer Timothy Nelson’s delicate yet lush, accompanying soundtrack music.
Finally, the various wood fruits and forms turn into flat shapes which move around to form a parquet floor- already glimpsed as a pulsating pattern – with the different coloured wood types going to make the geometrical pattern thereupon, over which rolls a green comb as if on some strange journey of discovery. The orange-y red and yellow curtain falls and the puppet head, which has been watching all this throughout, basks as if in the glow of what it has just been watching.
You might not get all this out of a single viewing of Wonderwood, but then the Quay’s works aren’t conceived so much as single viewing pieces as films to be watched again and again over a long period. To do that, your best bet is to get hold of the superb UK Blu-ray that the BFI released in 2016 entitled Inner Sanctums – Quay Brothers: The Collected Animated Films 1979 – 2013 which contains all the shorts, Wonderwood included. (An earlier BFI release on DVD, whilst also excellent, only goes up to 2003.)
The UK Blu-ray also contains numerous other essential filmic and written bits and pieces including the short documentary Quay (2015) by Christopher Nolan (feted director of Memento, 2000, The Dark Knight, 2008, Inception, 2010 and Dunkirk, 2017) which provides an excellent introduction to the Quays’ work.
Wonderwood is a commercial for the perfume of that name by Comme des Garçons:
Conceived as a prequel to China’s White Snake legend which has spawned numerous adaptations including Green Snake / Ching se (Tsui Hark, 1993), this computer animated Chinese epic concerns demon sisters Blanca and Verta (voiced by Zhang Zhe and Tang Xiaoxi) who look to all intents and purposes like beautiful women but are actually demon snakes in disguise – a white snake and a green snake as you might guess from their names. With her power and form enhanced by her sister’s gift of a green hairpin, Blanca leaves the demon world and visits ours for a showdown with a human General trying to prove his worth to the Emperor by dabbling in occult rituals involving snakes. When the showdown doesn’t go as planned, Blanca finds herself alone and suffering a complete loss of memory as to who (and indeed what) she is.
She awakes in a small, human, rural village where the local economy is built on catching snakes for the General. Local boy Sean (Yang Tianxiang) has no interest in catching snakes, spending his time instead sourcing toys for the local children or inventing things. Smitten with the amnesiac Blanca, Sean is astonished when by magic she rescues his dog Dudou from falling off a mountain ledge and by further magic gives the animal a human voice. Sean eagerly scrambles after Blanca as she flies up perilous mountain terrain, trying hard to look beyond her growing a snake’s tail when she does so, preferring to think of her as a woman rather than a demon.
It’s a strange and somehow very Chinese combination of creature feature, mythology and full on romance with the girl torn between the human and demon realms and the boy trying to justify his feelings for her. The physical effects work that Hong Kong would have been used 25 years ago is replaced by CGI which is generally of a higher standard than you would expect. As well as the two sisters, the snakes include a whole army of snake people whose cinematic origins go right back to Ray Harryhausen’s human-torsoed, snake-tailed Medusa in Clash Of The Titans (1981) and his similarly built, dancing girl in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (1958). The snake people’s leader, much like the two sisters, switches between woman and snake, in her case an ethereal, yellow fire snake.
Equally inventive is the creature that pulls the General’s chariot, which looks like a crane with three heads. Other highlights include a spectacular firebird and malevolent black manifestations of the General’s dark magic. When Sean and Blanca reach the forge where the green hairpin was made, they meet another demon in the form of a woman with two faces, one human and, when she turns round, one fox.
The whole thing is beautifully paced with never a dull moment. Full blooded romantics will be struck by a memorable ending which throws into the mix Chinese concepts of reincarnation. Anyone who enjoyed the action movies coming out of Hong Kong in their halcyon days of the eighties and nineties prior to Hollywood’s co-opting such stunts for The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999) will love this. Hong Kong did some amazing stunts using aerial wire work back then, but that will only get you so far and White Snake puts CGI to full and highly effective use, getting the most out of the medium and achieving things that would be near impossible in live action. So, to all intents and purposes an old school Hong Kong action fantasy redone as computer animation – and it works wonderfully. A joy.
White Snake played in the BFI London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On Amazon Prime from February (2021).
Hidden away in the LFF’s Family section where it looks like a suitably harmless piece of children’s animation, this turns out to be a fascinating exploration of difference and bigotry set among different simian races.
Prince Laurent, King of the Laantos turns up on the distant shores of the land of the Niokous. After being subjected to a full medical and scientific examination by Professor Abervrach and his team and their discovery that Laurent doesn’t speak their language, the Prince is sequestered in huge, secluded rooms within the Professor’s vast labyrinthine mansion complex.
Abervrach is assisted by a nurse named Nelly and the decidedly less friendly Elizabeth. He wants to present the newly arrived stranger to the science academy to prove his thesis about other races existing outside their country
The one person with whom the Prince really makes a connection is a boy named Tom. Selected by the Professor to be the stranger”s companion, Tom is gifted at languages, able to learn the tongue of the foreigner and consequently communicate with him. They talk for hours and become firm friends.
Through their discussions it emerges that the city visible through the mansion’s vast windows is slowly being overrun by the jungle surrounding it. This is confirmed by occasional elements of vegetation which appears to have forced its way into the edges of the mansion’s interior architectural features.
Eventually, Tom takes Prince Laurent on a trip outside to see the Victorian-styled city viewable from the mansion’s huge windows, where they board a tram and travel a circular route which takes them out of the city into the jungle beyond and back in again. They also find themselves attending local revelries in the form of a masqued event called the Festival Of Fear. Fear, it seems, is the guiding emotion in the metropolis.
Tom’s initiative in organising this trip will incur the Professor’s displeasure and lead to Tom’s being barred from visiting the Prince, who will later become caged like a zoo animal and put on public display. Tom will help him escape. Together, they will discover the wonders that lie beyond the confines of the city’s deeply regimented world.
The fact that all the characters are apes, some of whom treat others as inferior, has echoes of the Planet Of The Apes franchise(s) (1968, onwards) which originally sprang from French source material, Pierre Boulle’s novel Monkey Planet/La Planète Des Singes. It’s not Laguionie’s first foray into this territory: he previously made A Monkey’s Tale/Le Château Des Singes (1999).
The Prince’s Voyage is also remarkable for conjuring a whole other world, one in which a nineteenth century aesthetic holds sway. Somehow, that seems a good fit. Maybe it’s because Victorian sideburns are not entirely dissimilar to simian facial hair. Maybe it’s because on some subliminal level we make a connection between the period and Darwin’s theories of man being descended from apes. Either way, the visuals look fantastic on the big screen, taking the tale to a whole other level. And when The Prince and Tom finally leave the city for the jungle, what the directors achieve with that latter environment is equally visionary.
While there’s nothing here that’s unsuitable for children, this 2D animated slice of French fantastique is a clever fantasy that never insults an adult’s intelligence. Plus, the LFF are showing it in the original French language with English subtitles (with English voice translation on headphones for younger viewers). A visual treat.
The Prince’s Voyage plays in the BFI London Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:
