Tag: animation

Big Fish & Begonia (Dayu Haitang)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Around the age of 16, people in the spirit world must visit the world of the humans, with whom they are warned not to interact, as a rite of passage. Thus it is that teenage spirit girl Chun must pass through the elemental maelstrom linking her world and ours whereupon she is transformed into a red dolphin and made to spend seven days in the seas of the human world. On her sixth day, she hears a teenage boy play a dolphin-shaped flute to his sister; on her seventh she sees blue dolphins struggling in a fishing net. Her return to her world is blocked when she becomes entangled in a net between her and the whirlpool until the boy rescues her only to be himself fatally sucked into that whirlpool. This is more or less how the Chinese animation Big Fish & Begonia sets off.

Safely back in the spirit world, Chun understandably feels she owes him a debt so trades half her life to a soul keeper in exchange for that of the boy: she must nurture the boy’s soul which will be given the form of a fish in her world and release him back into the human world when the fish reaches adulthood, at which point she will die but he will live. She names the fish/boy Kun after a legendary sea creature of immense size.

There’s a lot more to it than that: firstly, an unrequited love story introduces teenage spirit boy Qiu who fancies Chun and looks out for her even though she treats him like no more than her big brother. Then, while the old aged male soul keeper watches over the souls of departed good people incarnated as fish, his equally old female counterpart watches over the souls of departed bad people incarnated as mice. Chun’s late grandma is reborn as a phoenix; her beloved grandpa, a Begonia tree. Also in the mix are a deadly two-headed snake, a mystical stone dragon and an unearthly ferryman who steers his barge along the clouds. And while in the human world the red dolphins swim among the seas, in the spirit world they soar through the skies along with cranes and dragons.

The whole is rendered in beautifully drawn animation as effective at portraying in the heroine’s internal life as it is in bringing incredible landscapes and fantastic creatures to the screen. The pace is mesmerisingly slow in places, breathtakingly action-packed in others. Where else can you see a girl sell half her life to save someone else’s, a man play mah-jong against three other versions of himself or the terrible portent of snow falling in the middle of Summer? For the finale, it throws in cataclysmic floods and waterspouts descending from the skies.

The production, which was intermittently on then off for some 13 years, was ultimately promoted by posts on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter) then financed by China-based crowdfunding. Very much an indie production by two directors with a unique vision, it’s a landmark entry in the annals of fantasy film and animated storytelling which deserves to be widely seen. Its limited UK and Irish release means you’ll need to make a special effort to see it. You should do so though because this magnificent home-grown Chinese offering demonstrates just how tired and formulaic most Hollywood fantasy and/or animated films are. Don’t miss.

Oh, and be warned there’s a key scene buried in the middle of the end credits.

Big Fish & Begonia is out in the UK on Wednesday, April 18th. It is screening in both subtitled (independent cinemas) and dubbed (Showcase Cinemas) versions. We recommend the subtitled version as screened to press. Click here to see where it is being screened. Watch the film trailer below:

Subtitled:

Dubbed:

The animated life of Isao Takahata!!!

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In the twin worlds of animation and movies, Japanese director Isao Takahata – who died yesterday aged 82 and whose death was announced earlier today by Studio Ghibli – was one of a kind. In 1985, following the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) which Isao Takahata produced and Hayao Miyazaki directed, the two men founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. People who know Ghibli tend to know the Miyazaki films, blockbusters in their home territory of Japan and big successes among family, animation and foreign language audiences internationally. Very fine films they are too. But Takahata is a slightly different kettle of fish.

Where Miyazaki, at least until he reached old age and started making noises about retiring, turned around a new film about every two years or so and these tended to be hits, Takahata often took twice as long and the resultant films were much less viable commercial propositions. This is the man who, for example, early in Ghibli’s history made a live action documentary about canals (The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals/1987), something about which he was clearly passionate but hardly the sort of blockbuster follow up to Nausicaä that would impress the bean counters.

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Not just another animated face

His next Ghibli film, the profoundly affecting Grave Of The Fireflies (1988), was a long way from traditional children’s animated fare being the story about a young boy and his much smaller sister orphaned during WW2 and their struggle to survive in an abandoned bomb shelter on a riverbank. It’s harrowing, tear-jerking and stunning.

Other films included Only Yesterday (1991, pictured above), in which a 27-year-old office girl rediscovers herself upon moving to the countryside. It’s peppered with flashbacks. The resultant film was considered so inherently Japanese by the Studio that for over two decades they refused to dub Only Yesterday into English, believing the task an impossibility. (Ironically, the excellent dub the Studio was eventually talked into a few years ago is in this writer’s opinion one of the few instances where for English-speaking audiences the dubbed version of a foreign animated film surpasses the original subtitled one).

His 1999 feature My Neighbours The Yamadas (pictured below) again broke the Ghibli mould in terms both of unfamiliar production techniques and visual style. Takahata wanted to create something akin to a newspaper strip cartoon wherein characters are loosely delineated by lines while the odd bit of pastel shading replaces the fully coloured-in look (the aesthetic historically popularised and locked in to the popular concept of what an animated film should look like by Disney’s industrialisation of the medium).

Takahata was determined to utilise computers – but not in the way that everybody else in animation did which was to create more immersive, three dimensional looking worlds and characters. He was after a completely different quality. If his approach indicated a purity of artistry, it made little economic sense. The Studio swiftly moved on to a more successful Miyazaki project (Spirited Away/2001) and Takahata didn’t work on another project for years. But he had introduced computers into Ghibli’s production process as a by-product of his artistic obsessions.

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A life extraordinary

The sheer quality of the director’s films inevitably had its admirers. In 2005, a Nippon Television Network executive approached Ghibli with the money to fund another Takahata offering so that he could go to his grave knowing he’d done so. Given a completely free rein, Takahata spent five years in discussion with a young Ghibli producer about a vague project which looked like it might never materialise. Eventually, he was talked into directing his own conception of an adaptation of the Japanese folk tale The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya (pictured below), but as production dragged on, dogged by Takahata’s perfectionist approach, it looked for a while like it might never reach completion. Takahata was dissatisfied with one element here and tinkered with another one there. Those who had to work with him must have been tearing their hair out. The film eventually appeared in 2014, a remarkably rich and strange work which no-one would make if their only intention was box office returns. Widespread international acclaim and an Oscar nomination followed.

Isao Takahata was a cinematic maverick whose refusal to play by the industry’s rules could easily have destroyed him. Instead, thanks in no small part to his association with Miyazaki and the latter’s considerable faith in him, Takahata directed a small number of truly remarkable films. We should be thankful his career went the way it did: he’s a director whose idiosyncratic vision overcame impossible obstacles to leave an indelible impression. His passing is a great loss which will be felt both by those at the Studio he co-founded and in the wider world of international film culture.

Early Man

Posted on by victorfraga

A true delight to watch, that’s probably the best way of describing Early Man, the latest animation by 59-year-old filmmaker Nick Park, from Preston. The film was produced by Aardman Studios, from Bristol. Both the man and the studios are behind comedy series Wallace and Gromit and the feature Chicken Run (2001), the highest-grossing animated film of all times.

Fans will not be disappointed. Animation fans. Football fans. Or anyone else, really. This is a movie that will touch your heart with its goofiness, absurdity and sheer cuteness. The clay characters are more energetic than ever. The film is set, as the title suggests, at the “early” days of prehistory, when cavemen still roamed the island of Great Britain. The film takes place “somewhere near Manchester”, it’s announced in the beginning, perhaps in reference to Park’s birthplace, Preston.

A young, clumsy and dishevelled caveman called Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) and his wild boar Hognob (Nick Parl himself) unite in order to save the valley where they dwell from occupiers from the Bronze Age City. This civilisations is far superior from a technological perspective, due to the widespread use of the metal. They have a fortress, houses, rugged gates, cookware and weapons, and they tend to sneer at the perceived inferiority of the cavemen. Their commander is the snooty and dandy Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston, sporting a strangely foreign accent).

Dug challenges Nooth to play a football match. If they win, they can get their valley back. The problem is that the Bronze people already have a football tradition, and even a football team aptly named Real Bronzio. The cavemen have never played football. But, hey, wait! Cave paintings by their ancestors reveal that their forebears where playing the sport long before Dug, his contemporaries and probably anyone else. So they too must have football in their blood and in their DNA. The problem is that they have since become incompetent rabbit-hunters, who have to scramble frenetically for a single prey (one of the brutes looks a lot like Boris Johnson, which made the rabbit chase look a little bit like the Brexit negotiations). The big question is: how is Dug going to convert his apparently useless tribe’s folk into football heroes?

Early Man has a profoundly British sensibility. A rough sensibility. A stone sensibility. The parlance is your average high street talk, with plenty with “hey, champion” calls. This ancient movie also attempts to emphasise diversity, with a black female and a strong empowered female coach. It celebrates a very British passion (football) without being esoteric. Early Man will teach you that Britishness stretches back to the Stone Age. And football wasn’t invented in the 19th century. It’s a prehistorical game, and indeed very British!

Early Man was out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 26th. It is available for streaming in late May. On Netflix on August 20th (2023).nThis dirty movie is suitable for children and adults alike!

MFKZ (international title: Mutafukaz)

Posted on by mjbstaging

Firstly, Mutafukaz (as MFKZ was originally named) is a Japanese animated feature made by the French for the French market utilising Japanese animation expertise (the version playing at the London Film Festival is French with subtitles, though the end credits suggest there might also be an English language version), secondly a very French, lowlife, dystopian action movie to rank alongside the live action likes of Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990) and, particularly, District 13 (Pierre Morel, 2004) and thirdly an adaptation of a French bande dessinée, the director Guillaume Renard having penned the original in comic book form under the name Run.

The animation medium allows the piece to completely design its images and environment from, as it were, the blank page/empty screen upwards and the results are fabulous. Japanimation company Studio 4°C previously worked on such high profile anime productions as SF portmanteau Memories (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1995), avant garde pop video Noiseman Sound Insect (Koji Morimoto, 1997) and fan favourite Spriggan (Hirotsugu Kawasaki, 1998) to name but three (others are name dropped in the trailer) and pull out all the stops here.

(Ange)lino is a small, young, black guy vaguely resembling Marvin Martian without the helmet and struggling to survive the mean streets of Dark Meat City (“DMC, as in Desperate, Miserable, Crap”) where he rents a roach-infested apartment with his mate Vinz whose head resembles a human skull, bare bone, no flesh, column of fire permanently burning on top. Lino can barely hold down a job for more than a few days.

We first meet Lino on a pizza delivery boy gig which falls apart when the sight of a pretty girl causes him to have a bike accident. Unemployed, Lino and Vinz are visited by their nervous liability of a friend Willy. As the three cruise around in a car, Lino notices a strange phenomenon inspired by They Live (John Carpenter, 1988): people who cast shadows belonging to creatures not of this Earth. Meanwhile, a mother with her baby in her arms is being hunted by mysterious, gun-toting men in black suits led by one wearing a white suit. Before long, they’ll be after Lino and Vinz too.

The film rattles along at a rapid pace through urban malaise, gangland shoot-outs and conspiracy theories, in passing presenting a squalid environment that could stand in for the seamier side of any number of real life cities. Designed in glorious, eye-popping colour and with a hip hop sensibility referencing Grand Theft Auto and more, it never lets up for a moment.

Although the production values have anime written all over them, with key fight scenes shots sporting familiar tropes of that medium, Renard’s Francophile sensibilities inject a whole other aesthetic and indeed feel to the proceedings. It’ll no doubt be huge in France, but it’s an impressive work which transcends its national culture and deserves to see a UK distributor taking a chance and giving it a proper release here too. I could never imagine London Transport accepting posters bearing the film’s international title, though. Which is why the new English language title MFKZ makes a lot of sense.

MFKZ played at BFI London Film Festival 2017 as Mutafukaz. It’s released in the UK on October 11th. Watch the 2017 international film trailer and the new 2018 English language film trailer below:

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

Posted on by mjbstaging

In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round. Soon, each starts writing the other messages on their hands, arms and mobile phones so that the other one knows what he/she has been up to while they swapped bodies. Until one day, her messages stop.

Like the falling meteor which unexpectedly splits into a shower, at once a beautiful display in the Tokyo night sky and an impending disaster in Itomori, this weaves together two ways of looking. Girl and boy. Countryside and city. Celebration and catastrophe. As a ribbon snakes through space and meteor fragments fall through the atmosphere, a thread weaves through a loom meshing separate timelines. When the two teens meet at the beginning, she is near the end of their encounter while he is at its start thanks to subtle storytelling sleight-of-hand. They may not both know each other yet, but they are connected. When finally they meet again on urban Tokyo hillside steps, the moment is poignant.

Although the meteor is expected to fall in one piece, at the last minute it splits into fragments, one of which will wipe out Itomori. After learning through Taki that this will happen, can Mitsuha and her friends alert the town – busy celebrating its annual festival – to evacuate before lives are lost?

Japanese films have dealt with disaster for a long time, most notably in Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954) which turned the devastation of the A-bomb into the eponymous, city-wasting monster. Recent reboot Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) shows the franchise still capable of delivering such myth and metaphor.

Not that Your Name is necessarily about nuclear strikes. Japan has a long history of earthquakes and associated natural disasters, most recently the 2011 tsunami and resultant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Life goes on but such disastrous events linger in the national psyche and inform popular culture. Even as Your Name absorbs Itomori’s annihilation into its wider culture as a pretty light show over Tokyo, it grapples with the magnitude of the disaster by placing us in the immediate days and hours beforehand.

Elsewhere, Your Name plays out as both teen romance and dual exploration of male/female identity. The two protagonists wake up separately in each other’s bodies to discover with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that they possess the genitals of the opposite sex. As the twin narratives move on to explore more psychological sexual differences, the body swap device proves genuinely affecting. By the time of the impending annihilation of Mitsuko’s home town, you’re completely hooked.

It’s one of those rare movies to watch multiple times. If, like this writer, you saw it last year in a small cinema, to catch the new digital IMAX print on a bigger sized screen is a real treat. While scenes with minimal detail and movement show up the fact, other sequences are all the more effective. This applies not only to the big outdoors vistas where you’d expect it but also more intimate, everyday scenes. In short, compared to much smaller screens, the IMAX format allows Your Name’s visuals the room they need to breathe.

Your Name is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 23rd.

For another animation about Japanese life against the backdrop of impending disaster, click here.

Genocidal Organ (Gyakusatsu Kikan)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is sci-fi of the ‘soldiers in a combat zone’ variety (think: Aliens, James Cameron, 1986) and as such comes with all the trappings of fetishised hardware – cybernetic internet point-of-view readouts and high-tech military machinery – along with the standard ‘horror of war’ scenarios seen in, for example, that other animated war movie Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) – and desensitised, shoot ‘em up scenarios in which the protagonist guns down 30 or so child/teen warriors and a girl in underwear (the latter the sexual plaything of a middle-aged man).

Genocidal Organ starts off with the levelling of Sarajevo in a nuclear blast wherein victims include the wife and child of a man named John Paul who is having sex with Czech language teacher Lucie Skroupova in a Prague hotel room when the blast hits. Although when you first see these images, you don’t know exactly what’s going on – it only makes sense later.

It also echoes Missing (Costa-Gavras, 1982) in which a US citizen’s search to find his missing daughter in Chile following the 1973 coup eventually comes up against the US authorities “protecting a way of life”. For the US to flourish, other countries have to suffer. Something similar happens in Genocidal Organ when the two off-duty soldiers relax to American football games on widescreen television with home delivery pizza. In order to protect that world of casual consumer satisfaction, they operate in a very different world of Eastern European states collapsing into war zones. The two worlds co-exist, the collapsing states ensuring the survival of the way of life in the non-collapsing ones.

Captain Clavis Shepherd must pursue John Paul, a language expert whose travels have left in their wake a trail of nations overthrown by genocide. His research has unearthed ways of speaking and associated speech patterns which can cause populations to lapse into social breakdown. Shepherd’s big lead is Lucie Skroupova, the woman with whom John Paul had an affair.

En route, the plot takes us through a Czech nightclub where the digital currency and identity trackers in use elsewhere have been abandoned to give customers genuine anonymity. Fetishised hardware geeks in particular will enjoy the terrific sequence in which soldiers in pods are dropped into battle zones, their pods firing at/shooting down the enemy as the soldiers descend from the skies.

Finally, the ending satisfyingly closes off the narrative with a hint that it may presage an unexpected twist in the tale.

Given this is about American troops in Bosnia, the Czech Republic and East Africa (near Lake Victoria), the English subtitled version proves initially confusing in that the protagonists are not Japanese but rather US and European nationals. The Japanese language presentation would no doubt work well for the domestic Japanese audience – and, for that matter, the Western purist who wants to watch their anime subbed regardless – however, in this instance, the US-centric subject matter might have benefited from dubbing into US American English and other relevant languages (with subtitles where necessary). As it stands, this subtitled Genocidal Organ proves confusing in places for an English-speaking audience. Yet it still packs a hefty punch.

Genocidal Organ is out in the UK on Wednesday, July 12th.

The Boy And The Beast (Bakemono no ko)

Posted on by mjbstaging

Nine-year-old Ren runs away from his mother and is promptly abducted by a creature named Kumatetsu into the parallel Beast Kingdom of Jutengai. Kumatetsu is the outsider of two possible candidates to succeed the retiring ruler of the beastly world. Renaming the silent boy Kyuta, he designates him apprentice and teaches him fighting skills. The relationship is strained and as the boy learns from his master, so too his master inadvertently learns life skills from his pupil. This is how it all begins in The Boy and the Beast.

Where Kumatetsu lacks in self-confidence, the boy encourages him in competitive battles with the rival candidate for ruler and popular favourite Iozen. Returning to our world as a much taller teenager, Ren meets school bullying victim Kaeda, bonding with her and sharing her appetite for human learning and knowledge. After this initial return, he continually moves between the two worlds in order to maintain his obligations in both. Meanwhile in Jutengai, Kumatetsu and Iozen’s rivalry for the position of grand master builds to a decisive climax…

It’s actually a lot more convoluted than that with a supplementary cast of further, minor characters. Nevertheless the narrative is coherent and even at two hours in length The Boy And The Beast rattles along at a good pace without overstaying its welcome. If the first 40 minutes play like a children’s film, the remainder of its running time sees the film’s sensibilities mature as the boy grows into a teenager. Beneath its ostensibly silly, juvenile plot it actually covers plenty of interesting topics – the interrelation and conflict between two very different cultures, issues of parenting and child dependency, confronting school bullies, teenage male angst and more.

Parts of the Japanese animation resemble some of that medium’s cheap formulaic clichés – two creatures charging each other and turning into larger, monstrous versions of themselves, for example – while other parts achieve far greater originality. One minute it feels like a martial arts movie, the next like a father and son drama and then a complex map of political intrigues. It’s all thoroughly impressive, certainly keeps the viewer on their toes and hangs together surprisingly well.

Some of the material is quite dark: humans grow holes in the centre of their physical bodies in the Beast Kingdom which function as a metaphor for their moral disintegration, a boy advances violently towards a defenceless girl in a school playground and, in the final reel, a villain dismisses an insignificant human book about a whale (Moby-Dick) prior to transforming into a terrifying, psychic version of its eponymous monster.

The present day, human world of Shibuya (a district of Tokyo) and its parallel Beast counterpart are lovingly designed and the whole thing is consistently beautiful to look at. At the film’s core though is the growing child and his relationship with his non-human master, a beautifully handled scenario which grabs the viewer from the get go. It’s due out on UK home cinema platforms in September but worth catching on its big screen outing in the meantime. A bit of a treat.

The Boy And The Beast was out in cinemas across the UK on July 7th, when this piece was originally published. It’s out on DVD and Blu-ray on September 4th.

In this Corner of the World

Posted on by victorfraga

This tale of life on the Japanese home front during WW2 is set in the major shipbuilding port of Kure in the Hiroshima Prefecture. The nearest city to Kure is Hiroshima: once you know that, you know the story isn’t going to end well. Welcome to In this Corner of the World.

Heroine Suzu Urano must leave the small fishing village where she grew up and move to Kure to marry a low level naval clerk. Living with his family brings its own challenges, such as getting on with her new husband’s sharp-tongued sister. These characters accept that not only does their government know best but also the War is an historical inevitability that must be endured for the greater good. Yet although there are sacrifices to be made, the War itself mostly seems an abstract, distant event which for most of its five years doesn’t really intrude that much upon everyday life.

Suzu loves to paint and draw and often has her sketchbook with her. Occasionally she finds herself in trouble when officials catch her sketching things they don’t want anyone depicting in wartime. But mostly, she delights in nature and the world around her. Director Katabuchi similarly delights in the medium of hand drawn animation.

Fumiyo Kouno’s manga, originally serialised in Manga Action magazine between 2007 and 2009, went through a lot of trouble to research the long vanished environments of Hiroshima and Kure and in the film Katabuchi expends similar effort. The result is that the drama plays out in convincing settings which go some way to draw the viewer in. Alas, much of the meandering domestic narrative counteracts the undeniably impressive visuals.

The final reel is another story, however. As American bombing raids reach Kure, the frightening realities of international warfare finally impose themselves on the civilian population. In something of a visual and emotional tour de force, Suzu and her small niece Harumi are caught in a blast in which Suzu suffers the loss of a limb. Suddenly it feels like we’re in a different movie, yet afterwards Suzu struggles resolutely to carry on and help others.

Worse is to come, though, in the form of a flash as the atomic bomb is dropped on the neighbouring city of Hiroshima. Initially no-one quite knows what has happened, although the full horror of the situation becomes clear to Suzu when she visits the area. Finding a small child wandering alone in the ruins, she and her husband adopt the girl who can be seen growing up in their post-war home as the credits roll. If the film ends on this optimistic note, its briefly seen, latter images of ordinary people affected by the harsh realities of conventional and nuclear warfare overshadow everything else.

In This Corner Of The World is out in the UK on Wednesday, June 28th.

My Life as a Courgette (Ma Vie de Courgette)

Posted on by victorfraga

This starts off with images of graffitied walls in a family home and only when an animated puppet hand picks up some coloured pencils does it become apparent that the proceedings are animated. Courgette lives at home with his mum who sits in front of the TV and shouts at it. The house is littered with her empty cans of beer, which Courgette builds into a tower in his room at the top of the house. His mother is killed in an accident involving a trap door. So he’s taken into care and driven to a home by kindly policeman Raymond.

At the orphanage, Courgette finds himself alongside a small number of troubled prepubescent children including the attention-seeking Simon and the quiet Camille. The kids are starved of parental affection but Monsieur Paul and other orphanage staff do what they can to compensate. Simon starts out bullying Courgette, but when Courgette falls for Camille, Simon helps him break into the office to see Camille’s records. These reveal she is traumatised from witnessing her adulterous dad kill her mum and there’s a possibility her abusive aunt may try to take custody of Camille to get the state benefit.

Unlike so many mainstream children’s films which are designed to capture young minds by throwing relentless, rapid fire sounds and images at them, this one concentrates on the plight of its characters and how they deal with deep-seated social issues confronting them. A wry observational humour underscores the whole thing, as when Simon explains to the others that the final point of “doing it” is that “the man’s willy explodes”.

Rather than try to be hyperrealistic, the puppetry adopts a very specific style with big wide eyes for the kids who, despite their plight, are smitten with wonder for the world around them and just want to fit in like everybody else. Yet, one girl expresses her unease with a nervous tic that makes her repeatedly bang a fork on her plate at table while another boy vents his hatred of police by emptying a bucket of water on Raymond’s head whenever the latter visits. An essentially good man separated from his partner, Raymond plans to adopt Courgette and give him a decent home.

These puppets so completely engage the audience that you enter into their world. There’s a very French feeling about the whole thing – the simple architecture of the orphanage reminded this writer of the school in Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) – which means the French subtitled version works slightly better than the English dubbed one (both are being released here, so check which one the cinema you propose to visit is showing). The French version also gains from making the voice of the mother considerably more savage, although it must be said that the excellent US English dub is better than most.

In short, this is a striking script adaptation of a book realised with a real love for the craft of the stop frame animation process. Yet it’s much more than that, too: tackling difficult social issues head on whilst delivering convincing child (and adult) characters with lots of rough edges in a simple story which holds the viewer’s attention throughout. One of the year’s best films, despite its brief 66-minute runtime, and absolutely suitable for children… although if you’re an adult, you don’t need to take kids as an excuse to see it.

My Life As A Courgette was out in UK cinemas in June, when this piece was originally writen. It’s out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, September 18th. On Mubi on February 5th (2022).

This film is in our top 10 movies of 2017.

Click here for another equally arresting animation out in cinemas right now.

The Red Turtle (La Tortue Rouge)

Posted on by victorfraga

From the get-go, this is not your usual 2D animated film. The Red Turtle is slow-paced, has no dialogue and is certainly not aimed at children. Yet there’s nothing here you wouldn’t want kids to see, as its PG certificate testifies. Whether young minds would be spellbound or bored I wouldn’t like to say. Nor is it Studio Ghibli’s usual home-grown, Japanese fare being a French-Belgian production by a Dutch director based in London. Nor does it start off where you might expect: a man adrift in a powerful, stormy grey sea separated by some distance from his overturned, small boat. There is no indication of how he got there, there are no flashbacks later on to show us what happened before that. Rather, the character reaches dry land and must survive there alone feeding on crabs and seagulls.

Understandably, the man builds a raft out of bamboo to escape, but out at sea his attempts are thwarted and he ends up back on the island. Somehow a woman appears on the island. They have a son and the son grows to be a man and leaves the island. The couple grow old. If the woman’s appearance sounds somewhat unbelievable, it makes sense within the narrative. Without wishing to reveal any story spoilers, let’s just say that, one, a red turtle and indeed a whole bale of turtles are involved and, two, the myth of the selkie (a sea creature that can turn into a woman) is invoked.

The story functions as an effective fable about adulthood and life. Michaël Dudok De Wit and his team brilliantly develop the character of the man through the various challenges he must face. For example, one early scene has him slip down a rock face to become unexpectedly trapped in a deep pool of water enclosed by sheer rock on all sides; he must find a way out or perish. When his small son later experiences the same predicament, the viewer wondering how this might play out recalls the father’s earlier experience as well as the mysterious, magical nature of the mother.

The film understands which details it needs to emphasise and when to emphasise them. The initial arrival on the island has the wind blowing through the rippling bamboo forest bordering the beach while the clouds move slowly, almost imperceptibly across the sky to enforce the sense of stranded isolation. These minutiae are abandoned later on by which time we have completely accepted the world of the island as real. Towards the end the island is hit by a terrifying tsunami which decimates the forest, as devastating a sequence as the storm which opens the picture.

Scuttling crabs provide lighe relief while an extraordinary dream sequence has the protagonist fly along the length of a mysterious jetty on the island. Yet the overall tale has a grit to it which plays against the overall mythical feel, grounding its characters in another world that looks and feels utterly tangible. The human experience of arriving in adulthood alone, reaching out and propagating the species runs very deep. That experience is essentially what this extraordinary film is all about.

The film is a co-production between the Japan’s Studio Ghibli and France’s Wild Bunch. Click here for another deliciously dirty animation, this time a fully Japanese one.

The Red Turtle was out in the UK in May, when this piece was originally written. It was made available on DVD and Blu-ray on September 25th.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Posted on by victorfraga

For those who never saw their less impressive first film, the eponymous Guardians are a rag-tag of space travelling mercenaries often on the wrong side of the law. Rocket (a raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper) has an unfortunate habit of insulting the wrong person at the wrong time. Peter Quill / Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) is a problem solver and adventurer, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) an agile fighter. The group also includes strong man Drax (Dave Bautista), from a race who take everything literally, and cute, walking baby tree-being Groot (voice: Vin Diesel). Welcome to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Clever and efficient story construction ensures that many different narrative strands are deftly balanced with several intertwined plots in play. Romantically involved with an Earthwoman in the 1980s, Ego (Kurt Russell) is an alien who seeds and cultivates mysterious plants on the planets he visits and is searching for his long-lost son Quill. A genetically engineered race called the Sovereign hire our heroes to protect their precious supply of batteries until Rocket steals some, at which point they send assorted armadas and later a gang of mercenaries led by blue-skinned Yondu (Michael Rooker) after them. And so on.

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Unusual elements fire off in every direction in this surprisingly innovative Marvel feature.

Leaving aside the plot, the space opera special effects are peerless and, seen on a huge screen in 3D, spectacular. All of which might be reason enough for the comic’s fans or even your average popcorn moviegoer to see it, if not for those of us who like our cinema on the more subversive side.

Where the film really scores though is in the spaces in between and around the franchising, the plot and the special effects which allow it room to breathe, play and get dirty. Take the very early scene in which the Guardians protect the Sovereign’s world from a marauding, tentacled maw. We’ve seen scenes like this before and they’ve become boring. This film knows that and shows much of the fight scene out of focus in the background or off to the side while in focus in the foreground baby Groot plugs in a sound system and dances to music as the mayhem rages.

Baby Groot will later fail several times to retrieve a simply described object from a sleeping jailer that would allow those who requested it to escape imprisonment and certain death. He keeps returning with various incorrect items. And later still, a lengthy sequence is constructed around baby Groot’s being assigned to press one of two buttons on a detonator, one of which would prove lethal. Infused with the spirit of gag cartoons or burlesque comedy, there’s something wonderfully subversive about all this.

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Some of the superheros from the surprising Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

Thus you have another scene where the action stops for Quill to insist that Gamora has an “unspoken thing” for him and dance with her on a balcony. Or a fight sequence where Yondu’s one foot long spear weaves a non-linear trajectory through the air as it takes out a plethora of enemy mercenaries by fatally piercing them one by one. Or an antagonistic character as complex as Gamora’s supposedly villainous sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) who may or may not be trustworthy. Or the iconic Kurt Russell clearly relishing his pivotal role. Or an entire sequence detailing a character’s funeral.

A big budget blockbuster this may be, but unexpected, additional elements constantly fire off in interesting directions without ever compromising form, narrative or visuals. The whole thing is efficiently scripted Hollywood eye candy with grime lovingly rubbed into its very fabric from the bottom up to turn it into something far dirtier and altogether more compelling.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 is out in showing in cinemas across the UK from Friday, April 28th. Get a feel for the movie by watching the trailer below. Then close your eyes and picture it in 3D.