Tag: animation

Bombay Rose

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

From its opening in which alternately horizontal and vertical paint brush strokes appear on the screen, slowly building into a street scene, you know you’re in good hands. This 2D animated tale deftly juggles its assorted characters and themes to construct a panorama of everyday life in Mumbai.

A framing device explores Bollywood action movies in which the no nonsense action hero can rescue the girl by beating up the bad guys. Outside of the movies, however, life isn’t quite so simple. The clearly well-off driver of a highly conspicuous, flashy car involved in a hit and run accident later in the narrative turns out to be the Bollywood action star glimpsed at the beginning. Those doing well out of the dream factory don’t live out the virtues it espouses.

Images of romantic lead Salim are modelled after the screen idol, yet unlike the idol, Salim is capable of change. When he steals flowers from graves to give one to Kamala, the girl he loves, she is horrified and labels him a thief, with the result that he changes his behaviour.

Also unlike the big star, both lovers have money problems. Salim is selling flowers to motorists, Kamala is doing a deal with a gangster to go to Dubai. That’s true of other characters too. An underage boy is dodging police raids while working illegally in a restaurant.

Meanwhile, his sister is taking English lessons from a fading Bollywood starlet Shirley D’Souza living in memories of a successful past. The starlet’s collection of automata from that period are breaking down, but happily her pupil’s grandfather has a gift for repairing such things.

The animation, designed with an intense and gorgeous colour palette to outdo even the most vibrant of live action Indian movies, allows the narrative to periodically shift into cultural, historical and even mythological areas and back again without missing a beat. As well as action movies, these include a man’s strange journey seated atop a flying horse with a woman’s head. We witness the killing of the hero’s parents at the hands of soldiers attacking their Kashmiri village. The gangster appears as a bird of prey, flying in to menace Kamala then flying out. There’s also a highly effective scene where as the ageing starlet walks down the street hand in hand with her young pupil, their surroundings turn from contemporary colour to period black and white.

This is an impressive warts and all picture of Mumbai. The animation style is highly original and well suited to the film’s aims. It’s not really like anything else out there and deserves a wider UK release.

Bombay Rose plays in the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th October. Watch the film trailer below:

Marona’s Fantastic Tale (L’Extraordinaire Voyage De Marona)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

We here at DMovies don’t usually get excited by an animated film about a dog and its owner. It would have to be a very special movie indeed to make that happen. Well, Marona’s Fantastic Tale is just such a movie.

It’s bookended with a device straight out of film noir. The main character has been hit by a car and is lying in the road, dying, in the arms of an old friend who got to him a few seconds too late to prevent disaster. Him isn’t correct though: both characters are female. Marona is a dog while late teenager Solange is her owner.

The narrative flies in the face of the idea that people take on pets and everything is hunky dory thereafter. Marona never has a stable life. She’s the last of nine puppies in the litter, so her mother names her Nine as if knowing that her daughter may not be around long and that a new owner will likely give her a new name.

The last to be born is the first to be given away as Marona is placed with her father, a haughty Argentianian mastiff of high birth unable to resist the charms of Marona’s seductive mongrel mother. We see very little of him as Marona only lasts about a day there and ends up walking the streets.

She is taken in by the kindly Manole, a penniless acrobat who busks for peanuts and rehearses wire walking and trapeze artistry in his garrett atop a building. He names her Ana. All is going well until he lands a circus job with a no pets contract.

Next, she attaches herself to construction worker Istvan who names her Sara. Initially, he lets her live on the building site where he works, then moves her in with his ageing mother for company. This sours when the old lady, given to violent turns, hurts the dog. So Istvan moves Marona into his home. Unfortunately, his wife regards the dog as little more than a fashion accessory and soon tires of her. Despite Istvan’s best efforts, the dog is soon homeless again.

Small girl Solange finds the dog in a park, renames her Marona and tales her home without telling her single mum or her grandpa. Her mum is furious, but somehow Marona is allowed to keep the dog. As a child she loves it dearly, but when she becomes a teenager, she finds looking after Marona a nuisance as she’s rather be out spending time with friends. One day, she abandons the dog in a park tying her lad to a tree so she herself can catch a bus downtown. When Marona breaks free and follows her, you know it’s not going to end well, especially after the dying dog sequence at the start of the film.

Visually the film is a treat. Manole the Acrobat is rendered in orange and yellow, moving with a captivating fluidity light years away from what you’d get in a classic Disney film. Istvan the gentle construction worker is a stocky blue body outlined in purple while his self-obsessed wife resembles a yellow version of a spooky ghost from a Fleischer Brothers cartoon. The portrayal of Solange and her family is more homely.

There’s a breathless street chase at the end as Marona follows the bus Solange has boarded, hard to watch because you’re expecting something to hit the dog at any moment.

Marona works not only as a film about the life of a dog but also as a series of snapshots of various sections of society – the insecure showman, the worker enslaved by the whims of his wife, the single parent family. On top of that. It’s a colourful, visual tour de force that will take your breath away. It fits the bill as a much better kids’ movie than most of the more commercial fare foisted on audiences by the major studios and it should equally delight dog lovers. Having said that, as a person who neither has young kids or dogs, I adored it. And I suspect you will too.

Marona’s Fantastic Tale showed in competition in Annecy. Watch the film trailer below:

Drive (Pulsión)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.

The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.

Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below:

Doozy

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

A brief and yet satisfying portrait of the US entertainment legend Paul Lynde, Richard Squires’ debut film Doozy takes multiple approaches to viewing its charismatic subject, from the conventional to the thrillingly experimental. As well as voicing a number of Hanna-Barbera characters and memorably recurring on the American television sitcom Bewitched, Lynde is probably best known as the centre square on the game show Hollywood Squares, as the deliverer of zinger after zinger.

Actual footage of Lynde is quite limited in Doozy, however, with Clovis, a cartoon likeness of the man reenacting anecdotes from his life over live action footage. It manages to summon the essence of the man with charm and an element of kooky mystery.

In taking a multiplicity of viewpoints, Squires doesn’t always get a handle on Lynde. One of his classmates is returned to again and again for commentary on her friend, her enthusiastic daughter cutting her off in order to give her own explanation. When we see a couple play the whole of American folk song I Wish I was in Dixie on guitars, as he cuts back and forth to shots of Lynde’s high school yearbook, it’s difficult to work out if the sense of Confederate nostalgia he’s created is ironic or otherwise. This uncertainty is part of what makes Lynde so compelling to return to; he symbolises something different to almost everyone.

A number of academics appear in Hollywood Squares to talk about aspects of the Lynde persona and impact. Squires focuses on their faces as they watch old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Some of their observations are insightful. While Mark Micale accuses Lynde of playing up to negative gay stereotypes, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen’s discusses the dubious concept of ‘pseudospeciation’ (the idea that social difference is motivated by cultural difference – Tribalism is scientific, how very pseud) leads to the conclusion that Lynde’s otherness is in his voice.

In fact, much of Doozy centres on the voice of Paul Lynde. And why wouldn’t it? Even as his TV roles are aired with increasing irregularity (although hour-long compilations of his Hollywood Squares appearances are readily available online), that shrill, expressive voice lingers in the cultural memory through impressions, references, and an influence that travels all the way down to the UCB comedy crowd. Doozy opens with clips of folks doing impressions of him, and Squires tries to link his voice to the essentially American by playing clips of it over footage of Chevrolets and suburban Americana.

In visual style, the cartoon sequences pastiche Hanna-Barbara, telling short anecdotes that aren’t so far out of the bounds of plausibility. If the voice acting was better (we have so many voice clips of the real guy that its easy to spot the fake), perhaps these scenes would feel better integrated, but they linger as asides rather than driving a thesis for Doozy. That said, sometimes it creates a nice effect, like seeing cartoon Clovis solicit a cartoon hunk and them tiptoe through seedy neon-soaked streets and into a hotel room, hiccuping while accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack, which progresses into something darker, tragic and hallucinatory. In moments like this, Doozy creates a heady late night vibe, as long as you don’t expect something truly illuminating about its legendary subject.

Doozy is playing in select UK screenings from April 23rd – just click here for more information.

What if Snow White wasn’t white???

Posted on by victorfraga

Fairy tales have a mysterious sense of hidden meaning, covert messages, and lost faith and legends; a strange depth to them that no other genre of fiction carries. Symbolism of apples, resurrection and the power of women flow throughout these stories all over the world. One story, more than any other, continues to fascinate many of us: Snow White.

There have been over 30 versions of her across the history of film. All of these films have portrayed her as a slim, Caucasian beauty with a kind and passive personality. They include Disney’s 1937 iconic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (directed by David Hand, Larry Morey, Wilfrey Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, William Cottrell and Perce Pearce; pictured directly above and below). But who was she based on? Where did the story come from? And how has film shaped the way we see her?

The original Snow White wasn’t some simpering maiden singing with birds over a well. She was a curvaceous beauty who enchanted the Emperor of China with her charm and charisma, battled her rivals in a cruel and often murderous court, and ultimately had to face her own vanity, leading to her downfall. So how did her image transform into the blushing, white-skinned Germanic maiden?

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In a faraway land…

The first Snow White can be found in a place you wouldn’t expect, 1,300 years ago in ancient Chengdu, a province of the Chinese Empire. Plucked from obscurity to marry royalty at the age of 13, and famous for her voluptuous figure and fondness for lychees, she nonetheless had her enemies at court. The rebel armies and rival courtesans all wanted rid of the elderly emperor’s favourite. He doted on her, employing 700 labourers to make her robes, presenting her with gold and jade worth millions.

All this attention created jealousy and anger, rumours stirring of corruption at the heart of her influence. Legend has it that the lychees themselves would be her undoing. She was found dead having eaten some, which were rumoured to have been poisoned. Others would insist she had been strangled by a rebel leader, but the truth has been lost in time. The lychee became the symbol of her downfall – and her decadence.

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An apple-to-lychee comparison!

Her body was wrapped in purple cloth – the Chinese colour for love – and buried without a coffin. The Emperor was distraught, and demanded her body be brought back to him to be buried in honour. When he was given her fragrance bag to remind him of her, he wept bitterly. He never truly recovered from his grief.

And so the story travelled down the Silk Road; the beautiful sleeping princess corrupted by poisonous fruit. On and on it travelled, down to the sea, across Italy and Germany. There it was mixed and met with other influences; the Christian elements of resurrection, the European apple replacing the lychee, and a glass coffin replacing the lilac fabric. Perhaps the dark colouring of her hair stuck, or myths of the whiteness of her skin passed down, for although she was reimagined in Europe as a Caucasian, she is the only fairy tale character with such striking physical traits.

Disney was the first film company to send her image reeling into popular imagination: yellow, blue and red becoming colours synonymous with her character. Like Lady Yang (pictured directly above and below, by Hanfugirl), Snow White is only 13 when she meets her ‘prince’, but the comparisons stop there. This story, along with the scores that would follow, were distinctly Germanic in feel: yodelling, European dress, kitsch cottages and a wicked witch replacing the archetypal evil stepmother.

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Return to the roots?

The other interpretations – most notably the live action retellings – are all based on this animation breakthrough. Every character since has followed the European version; a slim, white woman taking centre stage. As with so much of film as a genre, the biggest fish in the pond chooses the narrative. The white, Western world has laid claim to the tale and made it distinctly European in feel. Until now.

Snow White, it appears, is taking a trip back to her origins. While she won’t be appearing as Lady Yang – a story perhaps too adult for many young Snow White fans – the return is nonetheless interesting. In Snow White: Adventures In China (provisional title), the story will take place in the 19th Century, featuring a Chinese cast and following a tale of Snow White and her rivalry with an embittered sorceress. A story, perhaps unwittingly, eerily echoing the competition and rivalry faced by Lady Yung hundreds of years earlier.

Big Screen Entertainment Group (BSEG) is overseeing the project in conjunction with a Chinese production team, East and West mingling once again across the tale. As film is a genre which so often struggles with presenting an intersectional approach to storytelling and production, it will be intriguing to see how this plays out. Hopefully Snow White will be the first of many fairy tales being retold in their cultures of origins.

The new film is currently in development. The ball is definitely rolling, even if little information has been disclosed! The producers are both American and Chinese, and the actions will be shot in Louisiana (US) and China next year. BSEG are producing it alongside K7 and various Chinese investors. The project was first announced in 2015, and it is currently under production.

The film producer Kimberley Kates told DMovies: “I’m super excited about Snow White: Adventures in China: we’re into development and we are shooting next year. It’s wonderful to be retelling a story that is loved by children all over the world.”. The images in the picture gallery above are from the new production, copyright by BSEG.

Tehran Taboo

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Here’s a thing. Packed with political, sexual and social subject matter, this is a live action film shot in Tehran. Only it’s neither live action nor shot in Tehran. The content rendered shooting on location pretty much impossible. The live action is actors shot against green screen with a view to building the location into the film later on. Then it’s treated by a process called rotoscoping which, despite having been around for the best part of a century, is not that well known outside of animation and movie special effects circles.

Rotoscoping is basically tracing images of e.g. actors off sequential single frames of film to retreat them as drawings in animation – think of the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence in Yellow Submarine (Geroge Dunning, 1968). It was invented and patented by legendary animator Max Fleischer for his Out Of the Inkwell trick film shorts (1918-27) featuring Koko the Clown. More recently, Richard Linklater employed a computer enhanced version of the technique on Waking Life (2001) and Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly (2006).

In Tehran Taboo, the locations are provided by a combination of drawn images and 3D elements which have been composited with the rotoscoped cast within the computer. Not only is the overall effect thoroughly convincing, the film has a hyperreal aesthetic which straight live action doesn’t. There’s a compelling, almost hypnotic quality to it.

A snowbound, midwinter opening with a car kerb-crawling lines of prostitutes sets the scene. Life under fundamentalist Islamic rule seems to regard women as inferior citizens who must get their husband’s written permission to be allowed to do anything. No such bureaucratic checks exist for the men, although as suggested by the scene where a man is taken away by police from a park where he’s been holding hands with a woman, everyday life can be far from easy for them, too.

The three-handed plot concerns three women. Pari (Elmira Rafizadeh) is a prostitute doing her best to raise her young boy as a single mum. She dispenses sexual favours to an aging judge as a means of getting her son past an officious, low level female bureaucrat who is refusing him admission to the school in the area into which Pari and son have just moved.

The judge puts Pari up in a vacant flat he happens to own where she makes friends with respectable housewife and mum-to-be Sara (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) whose hardline husband is refusing to sign the form to allow his wife to work during her pregnancy. One evening, larking about with Sara and slightly drunk, Pari undertakes as a prank call to the building’s caretaker and suggest a rendezvous. She does this on Sara’s phone which will eventually have dire consequences for the latter.

Meanwhile, a third woman Donya (Negar Mona Alizadeh) visits an underground dance club where she has sex with a musician Babak (Arash Mirandi) in the men’s room. However, she’s due to get married very soon and needs to prove her virginity to her husband. This requires an expensive operation for which she insists Babak must pay. So he sets about finding out about either this operation or possible alternatives to it.

Like Pari’s son taking delight in dropping water bombs from his balcony onto unsuspecting innocents below, the men here mostly game the system and have everything their own way. The women, however, have a much harder time of it, wherever they fit (or don’t fit) in the social spectrum. Ironically for a system that purports to uphold sexual abstinence or monogamous relationship, the woman that fares best here is the worldly-wise prostitute while the respectable, faithful housewife who makes one accidental minor slip finds herself in an ever worsening, no win situation culminating in a devastating rooftop finale involving a phoenix costume and a camera held by Pari’s astonished son.

If the rotoscoping process adds anything, it ups the visual ante producing the movie equivalent to reading a graphic novel. But the film stands on the merit of its writing and strong performances from its highly effective cast. See it – and be reminded of the freedoms we in the West have that are all too easily taken for granted.

Tehran Taboo is out in the UK on Friday, October 5th. Out on VoD on Monday, January 7th (2018).

Mirai

Posted on by victorfraga

The sensibility of a child is not an easy one to transpose onto the silver screen. Our little human beings have an entirely different way of seeing the world, with a very fertile imagination, a lot of curiosity, a certain naivety, but also a touch of callousness. Recreating a child’s world isn’t just about plush and colourful images, toys, fairy dust and pixies. Subtlety and nuance are also mandatory. Mamoru Hosada’s latest film succeeds at all accounts. Mirai is both sophisticated and ingenious, and it’s entirely relatable whatever your age.

A spoiled and pampered four-year old boy called Kun (voiced by Moka Kamishiraishi) is perplexed and indignant at the arrival of his newborn sister Mirai (Haru Kuroki), whose name means “future” in Japanese. His parents (voiced by Gen Hoshino and Kumiko Aso) now have to divide their attention between the two children. The two adults are never named, emphasising that the film is seen from Mirai’s perspective (who simply calls them “mother” and “father”).

Kun is used to all of the attention to himself, so he’s predictably jealous. Extremely jealous. And angry. Red with anger even. He’s prone to tantrums, which throw the hitherto household into disarray. Sounds banal? Well, it is banal. Until you penetrate Kun’s imagination, which is teeming with action, fantastic concoctions but also very vivid fears. Almost the entire film takes place inside Kun’s house. It’s Kun’s imagination that has the ability to travel very far,

Mirai will transport you back to your early childhood, when reaching a doll or a piece of bric-à-brac sitting on a shelf without attracting your father’s attention was a mammoth quest. Kun has two handy imaginary helpers: a grown-up version of Mirai and his anthropomorphised pet dog. The unlikely trio embark on a very thrilling adventure, and this is just the first of many voyages.

Later on, Kun’s vivid imagination establishes a dialogue and a relationship with his late great-grandfather. He has overheard his parents talk about how his forebear – whom he never met – survived WW2, became disabled and married his great-grandmother. His grandfather represents a connection with the past, while Mirai represents a link with the future (the nominative determinism speaks for itself). Past, present and future mingle together, providing integrity and continuity’s to Kun’s family history.

Mirai has at least three subtle yet very significant and pertinent messages to Japan, a conservative country grappling with a demographic implosion (the population is shrinking very quickly). Firstly, the film suggests that it’s good to conceive. Children humanise parents, who become “unflappable”. So let’s have babies! Secondly, the father is caring and doting, and he helps to look after the children. Quite refreshing for a country where men work so hard they never have time for their family. A few years ago, Japan created the annual Beloved Wives’ Day in order to give men the rare opportunity to spend time with their family. Thirdly, the mother is a working mum. Japan has a problem with females giving up their career after they become a mother.

The graphics of Mirai are a delight to watch. They become increasingly soulful and elaborate as the narrative progresses in a tandem with Kun’s imagination. There’s plenty of cuteness, as the opening song suggests (the lyrics cry “cute, cute, cute”, in English). But there’s also plenty of sadness. Enough tears to fill up the Sea of Japan. And there’s a touch of ugliness. The representations of evil and loneliness are quite jarring, even for adults.

Mirai premieres as part of both the BFI London Film Festival (UK premiere) and Scotland Loves Anime (Scottish premiere) in October. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 2nd.

The Breadwinner

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s Angelina Jolie’s name that’s splashed and emblazoned across the posters and all marketing collateral of The Breadwinner. The American actor-turned-director-turned-producer often associates herself with conflict-ridden parts of the planet, such as in her directorial debut A Place in Time (2007) and the subsequent In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011). Jolie now signs the production and lends credence to a highly politically-engaged animation set in Afghanistan. While Jolie’s name is a welcome addition, the film would also function perfectly well without the super star trademark.

Directed by Irish filmmaker Nora Twomey, penned by Ukrainian scriptwriter Anita Doron and based on a children’s novel by Canadian author Deborah Ellis, The Breadwinner is a delightful treat. It has a Western feminine sensibility, but plenty of Eastern colours, textures, flavours and sounds.

Eleven-year-old Parvana (voiced by Saara Chaudry) helps her father Nurullah (Ali Badshah) on the streets on Kabul to sell basic staples and make ends meet. He lost a leg in the Russian war, and he’s now a quiet advocate for gender equality. He encourages both of his daughters to be strong and fend for themselves. But they live under the purview of the Taliban, and such liberating views are deemed unacceptable. He’s consequently arrested.

Parvana’s family are left entirely destitute and facing possible starvation. So Parvana does the unthinkable. She cuts her hair short and puts on the clothes of her dead brother and becomes a street trader for the family. Cross-dressing is an extremely subversive act in such a conservative environment, and the consequences of being uncovered could include severe physical punishment and even death. Well, at least Parvana isn’t the first person to embrace the opposite gender in a Muslim country for practical reasons, rather than sexual or biological requirements.

The animation is extremely plush and vibrant. Red and brown hues of arid land contrasted against soothing and yet vaguely intimidating night blue. Parvina’s eyes are enormous and expressive (a little bit like the film producer Angelina Jolie!). The variety of colours and textures look like they came from a pop-up book, yet they are never cheap and tasteless. The entire film feels a little oneiric and a little puerile. Like a child’s vivid imagination. The soundtrack includes both Eastern and Western sounds, such as Toronto vocalist Felicity Williams and the Nahid Women Choir of Afghanistan.

Ultimately, this is a film about being forced to grow up prematurely and also fending for yourself as a female in a ultra-reactionary society. Parvana is warned: “don’t be in such a hurry to grow up. It might not be what you expect”. Yet there is little she can do in order to stop herself from engaging in an adult role in such a young age. This is a deeply riveting and educational film for the whole family. It’s a pity it only received a 12 certificate because of “threats” and “violence” in the film.

The Breadwinner is out on VoD (digital download) on Monday, September 17th, and on DVD/Blu-ray the following Monday.

Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero

Posted on by victorfraga

This looks like harmless, child-friendly fun for the whole family. Stubby was a stray mutt that witnessed horrific battles, saved lives and performed a multitude of heroic feats during WW1. Now his story has been turned into an adorable computer-animated film, voiced by Logan Lerman, Helena Bonham Carter and Gérard Depardieu. The film celebrates the incredible bond between man and his best friend, even in arduous conditions. What’s there not to love? Well, I do have a few reservations. Please allow me to unearth the dirty facets of this charming – and yet not entirely innocent – movie.

The titular mongrel was found on the grounds of Yale University in Connecticut in July 1917, where members of the 102nd Infantry were practicing for the imminent combat across the Atlantic. He almost immediately became their official mascot. Stubby (called such because of his stubby tail) served for 18 months and partook in 17 battles on the Western Front. He saved his regiment from surprise mustard gas attacks, found and comforted wounded soldiers, and even caught a German infiltrator in the trenches – all of these episodes are portrayed in the animation.

The film centres on young U.S. Army doughboy Robert Conroy (Logan Lerman), the first person to adopt Stubby. The story is narrated by his sister Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) – a peculiar way of inserting a female voice into a movie. Eventually, French poilu Gaston Baptiste (Gérard Depardieu) joins the Americans along their epic journey through hell, as they fight against the Germans near the French/German border.

The filmmakers opted not to give Stubby a human voice in order to keep the film as realistic as possible. Stubby barks and whines. His facial expressions and sounds will make even the coldest of hearts melt. Yet he does not talk. Stubby is not anthropomorphised, at least not in the physical sense.

Yet Stubby is anthropomorphised in the military sense. He is thoroughly obedient, boundless courageous and he will fight to the end without questioning the nature of the battle. In other words, he possesses all the qualities that a good soldier should have. He’s the epitome of indomitability and servitude, the core qualities of nationalism. In fact, there is no shortage of nationalistic signifiers in the movie: an enormous American flag taking up the whole the screen, an emphatic “God bless the United States of America”, “Vive Les États Unis”, a tub-thumping soundtrack, and so on.

There was one little detail in the film, perhaps irrelevant to most people, that caught my attention. Stubby does a hand salute (or rather a “paw salute”) upon request, demonstrating unwavering loyalty and obedience. Cute? Well, I happen to find such gesture very disturbing. It reminded me of those who teach their dog how to pray before they get a treat. Dogs don’t understand military protocol and religious doctrine. It’s us humans who push our credence and rules upon them in order to make our very own bizarre rituals more palatable and humanised.

I have a dog myself, a loving chihuahua called Lulu, and I understand that a pooch can connect us to our most profound human qualities. But I find it regrettable that we should use animals in order to make a military apparatus more attractive. War is war, and it’s ugly; it should never be sanitised and romanticised, particularly through the use of animals in a film made for children. I see the war bravery embodied by Stubby as propaganda for recruiting young soldiers, in a country that should instead give up its military belligerence.

Of course this is WW1, when the US had an entirely justifiable and recommendable role in the conflict. They indeed helped to save the world. In such context, it’s easy to justify a “good vs evil” narrative, thereby celebrating Americanness. The problem is that the world has changed enormously in the past 100 years, and it’s now Americans who perpetrate the majority of illegal wars and atrocities in the world. That’s why any war apologia and signifiers of nationalism must be taken with caution, particularly if coming from the US.

Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero “marches into cinemas” on Friday, August 10th.

Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms

Posted on by victorfraga

Fifteen-year-old Maquia is from the Clan of the Separated, where all members are blonde females who stop ageing in their mid teens and proceed to live for centuries. She is warned never to fall in love with an outsider because this would inevitably lead to loneliness. That’s because the loved one will age and die long before her. The problem is that Maquia is an orphan, and so she feels very lonely anyway. One day, a foreign army invades their otherwise peaceful land, seeking to unveil to secret of their near-immortality. Maquia manages to flee, and she miraculously encounter a baby boy who’s also an orphan during her escape.

The two orphans predictably bond. Maquia adopts the baby, whom she names Ariel. Maternal love ensues. The problem is that Ariel is not from the Clan of the Separated, and he will age very quickly. This interesting twist on motherhood is precisely what makes Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms clever and engrossing. It’s impossible not to be moved by the protagonist attempts to forge a relationship with the baby and then watch him grow old while she remains the same. She is suffering in silence, presuming that she will watch him die one day, leaving her once again alone. This is probably the biggest conceivable pain for a mother. This is where the female sensibility of the filmmaker blooms.

The photography of Maquia is typical of a fairy tale, and it’s pleasant enough to watch. At times, the images are sumptuous, teeming with blue skies, verdant hills, medieval-looking castles, white dresses and blonde hair, much like an old-fashioned European princess story (including a vulnerable female who gasps and cries all the time). There is also an elegantly somber facet to the movie, with red-eyed dragons called Renatos, earthly colours and mouldy walls. Impressive enough for children and adults alike.

But this is also a film with many flaws, mostly in its epic narrative. Its multilayered arc is too elliptical. I struggled enormously to follow the plot. The story has more twists and turns than a garden hose. I wouldn’t even know where to start describing it. It would have benefited from a simpler narrative.

Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms is out in cinemas across the UK on Wednesday, June 27th.

Jiří Brdečka: Master of Czech Animation

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Being an animation obsessive, but not one with any great love for mainstream Hollywood, I’ve been looking forward to this event for some time. The former Czecholsavakia – today’s Czech republic – has a remarkable film heritage of animation of every conceivable type. Jiří Brdečka may not be one of that tradition’s best known names but his idiosyncratic and stylish films make getting to know his work a must. A couple of days ago, this excellent trailer for the event turned up on YouTube courtesy of the Czech Centre London which gives something of a flavour of the great man’s work. It promises to be a very special evening indeed.

A selection of Brdečka´s best animated shorts featuring among others a daring hymn to free thinking (Gallina Vogelbirdae; 1963 Grand Prix Winner at the Annecy International Animation Festival), a Gothic tale inspired by 17th Century woodcuts, a horrifying murder story reminiscent of Greek tragedy, a story of star-crossed love, and a touching miner´s ballad.

These films of immense poetic and artistic quality place Brdecka alongside Czech masters such as Jiří Trnka and Karel Zeman while reminding us that Disney is not the only model for telling stories through animation and that animation is not just for children.

Jiří Brdečka (1917 – 1982), script-writer and director, has directed 35 animated films, that have been awarded more than 40 international prizes, including the grand prizes at Annecy, Oberhausen, Montevideo and San Sebastian. A close collaborator with Jiří Trnka, Brdečka worked with the best artists (e.g. Kamil Lhoták, Eva Švankmajerová, Jiří Anderle, Zdeněk Seydl) and musicians (e.g. Zdeněk Liška, Jan Klusák) to deliver beatifully animated stories full of poetry and humour.

You can book for the event here and the press release for the evening is reproduced below. There will also be a Q&A with the writer and film critic Tereza Brdečková.