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:
Our story takes place in 1845 on the misty Irish coast. The potato blight is quickly destroying crops and people are facing starvation. A fisherman called Colman (Donall O Healei) lives a mostly peaceful life with his wife and daughter, until his landlord increases his taxes. The ruthless and greedy Englishman was aware that the potatoes were rotting and that poor people such as Colman could hardly feed themselves, let alone pay out more money. His attitude epitomises that of the British Empire, who infamously allowed nearly two million people (nearly a quarter of the country’s population) to perish.
Colman decides to meet up with his landlord in the hope to find a peaceful solution, but violence unexpectedly erupts as a fellow Irishman decides to do justice with his own hands. The allegiance of certain Irishmen is very ambiguous. Many had joined the British army and fought for the Empire in the various wars overseas, therefore earning certain privileges. Will they once again stand by the reckless and murderous colonisers (and keep their privileges) or will they this time side with their very own people?
After the bloodshed, Colman runs away and lives inside a cave on the seashore, presumably hiding from authorities. He takes an orphan with him, a girl called Kitty. Progressively, the starvation escalates. Colman’s wife and child have passed away, and so have many locals. Potatoes are gone and all the barnacles have been eaten. Locals resort to extreme measures in order to feed themselves. An elderly man is killed for his blanket. All traces of humanity gradually vanish. Plus winter is approaching, which could seriously compromise Colman’s and Kitty’s meagre chances of survival.
Almost entirely spoken in Gaelic, Monster examines the most traumatic moment in the history of Ireland. It’s filmed on the dramatically craggy coast of the nation. The landscape is impressive yet threatening. The waters of the sea are just as turbulent as the lives of people. The soil is barren and damp. Beautiful Irish songs and chants add a nice and gentle touch to the tragic environment.
The narrative, however, has quite a few loopholes. It’s never entirely clear how Colman’s family died, how he ended up with Kitty, and why it took the child two years before she told him her name. There are also problems with make-up and casting. Some of the starving people (including Kitty) are the picture of health, with rosy cheeks and a fit figure. The horrific symptoms of diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, smallpox, the flu and many other diseases that were decimating the Irish people are not very realistic. As a result, the movie often feels artificial and contrived.
Monster showed in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s in cinemas on Friday, October 15th (2021).
Warner Bros’ latest effort in their strategy to create a self-contained universe out of Toho’s Godzilla and his accompanying trademark monster characters to rival that of Disney’s popular Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes is a mixed bag. On one level, it’s a hackneyed family story involving a couple splitting apart with their daughter caught in the middle, a plot not of the slightest interest to fans of Godzilla who aren’t paying to see a family drama. On another level, it’s a thinly veiled excuse to recreate Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan and others with state-of-the-art, special effects technology and have them fighting against one another, at which aim it succeeds handsomely. In passing, it delivers facile, one-line ideas about nuclear war and global warming. Finally, it wants to explore the iconography of these extraordinary creatures, but scarcely knows where to begin. They are great properties, but you can’t help but wish it was directed and produced by people with a stronger visionary sense.
The family story concerns scientist Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) with her daughter Madison (Billie Bobby Brown) in tow. Her husband Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), who when the film starts is out in the wilds studying wolf packs, is attempting to get back in touch with his daughter by email. Insofar as this family dynamic drives the characters, it feels pretty redundant. Farmiga upstages the rest of her onscreen family, investing her essentially cardboard character with pathos well beyond what the hackneyed script deserves. The presence of scientists played by oriental actors Ken Watanabe and Ziyi Zhang seems curiously peripheral, even though at one point the former plays a significant role in attempting to rejuvenate an apparently dead Godzilla.
Much more interesting is Emma’s use of a device she’s built called the Orca to produce sound frequencies mimicking those of Titans in order to make them behave in certain ways. Her falling in with crazed military type Jonah Allen (Charles Dance) suggests her as a megalomaniac determined to unleash the giant beasts and cause havoc on Earth, but then she presents an alternative scenario in which mankind has ruined the planet through global warming and the monsters are its way of getting out of control humankind back in its rightful ecological place thus saving the planet from extinction. Promising concepts, but sadly they’re never really developed into anything. The same is true of ideas about Godzilla absorbing radiation so that he can produce self-immolating blasts which nuke his one-on-one adversaries in battle while he survives.
Put aside the many shortcomings, however, and the recreations of giant radiation-breathing lizard from the sea Godzilla, flying creature Rodan, Mothra the giant moth and, most especially, three-headed King Ghidorah, greatly impress. The latter is the real star here, with his three heads swirling around menacingly on their long necks. Ghidorah possesses hydra-like qualities, but only once do we see a missing head regenerate, one of numerous elements on which the filmmakers fail to capitalise. A line of script somewhere posits him as a being from outer space who’s come to Earth and upset the balance of the monster ecosystem by displacing the ruling Godzilla, another idea which is nice as far as it goes, but doesn’t go very far. Kong is name-checked a few times and appears occasionally in static images to remind us that Godzilla vs. Kong is due out next year.
A mysterious organisation called Monarch, the corporate logo of which coincidentally resembles that of Extinction Rebellion turned on its side, has a series of numbered Outposts around the globe where various giant beasts are held in underground storage facilities. As titles such as ‘Monarch Outpost 61, Yunnan Forest, China’ appear on the screen, they create a believable sense of a covert, global network.
Yet in terms of developing an overall mythology, the whole is nowhere near as satisfying as the vision behind Warner Bros’ underrated kaiju (giant monster) movie Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013). Toho’s original Japanese Godzilla/Gojira (Ishiro Honda, 1954) and the more recent Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, 2014) both proved the property capable of incisive socio-political comment even as its men-in-rubber-suit monsters of the fifties or their later computer-generated effects counterparts satisfyingly burned and stomped Tokyo. The new Godzilla: King Of The Monsters doesn’t really have anything like as much to say, preferring to trade in spectacle and fall back on monsters fighting each other, sending in troops with guns whenever the proceedings need another boost to keep the adrenaline up. In other directorial hands, it could have been very special indeed: on so many levels, a seriously wasted opportunity. That said, the creatures themselves are fabulous – and they get an awful lot of screen time.
Godzilla: King Of The Monsters is out in the UK on Wednesday, May 29th. Watch the film trailer below:
