Tag: Annecy

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:

Memorable (Mémorable)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The techniques used in this remarkable short include both computer and puppet animation, with all the surfaces of both the puppets and the sets resembling that of a canvas painted with oils. It’s the perfect artistic form in which to express the story the film wishes to tell.

Louis is a painter suffering from dementia. Neither he nor his wife and model Michelle are coping well. He struggles to recognise different items of food by name at the dinner table – a bit of a problem when Michelle asks him to pass the pepper – and attempts to eat a banana without taking the skin off it first.

He jokes about degenerative mental diseases when being interviewed by a visiting health professional, but can’t recognise the mobile phone on the table in front of him. As his memory banishes the very concept of a mobile phone to beyond Louis’ mental grasp, the already disfigured object breaks up into little black droplets floating upwards before him.

Worse is to come: a system of post-it notes each containing a simple drawing attached to its appropriate object, such as a sun to indicate an anglepoise lamp, starts to break down. The notes fall from their designated objects creating a sea of incomprehensible imagery to wade through and for Michelle to tidy up on the floor. Louis is shocked to discover the bathroom occupied – his wife has to point out that the alien occupant causing her husband such distress is in fact only his reflection which he no longer recognises as such.

At one point in the proceedings, she’s had enough and sinks to locking him in his room so he can’t pester her. At another, she explains there are no fish in the fish tank because Louis failed to feed them.

Finally, he mistakes his wife for a hired carer. He comes on to her, but pulls back telling her, heartbreakingly, that his wife gets jealous and waltzes round the room with her instead. As they dance, she is reduced to an empty space parts of whose surface is defined by her husband’s sparse brushstrokes to which he adds a few more.

This is dangerous, emotionally charged and highly challenging material underscored with commendable humanity.

Memorable (Mémorable) played in Annecy where it picked up three awards – a jury distinction for powerful storytelling, a junior jury award for a short film and an audience award – making it a likely contender for this year’s Best Animated Short at the Oscars. Watch an extract below (French no subtitles):

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:

Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Following the success of his surrealist film L’Age D’Or/The Age Of Gold (1930), film director Luis Buñuel finds his main source of funding cut off when the strongly Catholic mother of his primary investor puts pressure in the latter. At the same time, a stranger named Eli Lotar strikes up a post-premiere conversation with the director saying he saw no influence of Dali in the film and presses a book Las Hurdes into Buñuel’s hands.

Frustrated at the lack of funding for his films, Luis decides to film the book which details the appalling living conditions of poor people in a remote village in rural Spain. He visits old friend Ramón Acín who has a family and recently sold a sculpture, immediately ploughing the money into a school for poor locals. They go drinking and Ramón buys a Christmas lottery ticket, joking that if he wins, he’ll fund the film. Amazingly, he wins.

So as producer, Acín accompanies Buñuel to a remote village in Spain to film the documentary Land Without Bread/Las Hurdes (1933).

This fits neatly into the genre of films about filmmaking and film history. Its production in the two dimensional cartoon medium allows for elements as Buñuel recreating for the camera such true life scenes as a goat falling to its death from a dangerous mountain ledge and the occasional dream or fantasy sequence – Daliesque elephants on stilts walking the streets of Paris, a dream in which a beautiful, half naked woman turns embarrassingly into first The Blessed Virgin Mary and second his own mother. Excerpts from L’Age D’Or and Land Without Bread are live action clips from those films.

There are also minor nods to Japanese 2D animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki, with characters lying on the ground on a hot day staring at a clear blue sky.

Whether you’re familiar with Buñuel or completely new to this giant of Surrealist cinema, this Spanish/Dutch production is well worth seeing. Even if the obvious selling image of elephants on stilts doesn’t accurately represent most of what it’s about.

Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles showed in Competition at the 2019 Annecy Animation Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on VoD on Thursday, July 16th (2020).