Category: Animation

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Animation Features Movies

True North

Director – Eiji Han Shimizu – 2020 – Japan, Indonesia – 93m

****

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

The life of an ordinary family living in Pyongyang is interrupted when their father disappears and their mother is unable to tell their infant son Yo-han and his younger sister Mi-hee exactly what has happened to him, although she reassures them that everything will be fine. A few days later, in the middle of the night, there’s a knock at the door of their apartment. Officials come in and search the place, make the family pack a few belongings then put them into a truck.

On the ensuing journey, there are no stops for the lavatory. The truck takes them to a political camp where they will be imprisoned although it’s never quite clear what offence they have committed. Father is apparently an enemy of the state, even though he appears to have an exemplary record. Despite promises that the family will see him soon, he’s not in the camp to which they’ve been taken. They are going to have to fend for themselves there.

Mother does her best to keep her kids’ spirits up – no mean task when you’re living on meagre rations and forced to do backbreaking work shifts harvesting crops in the fields (woman and girls) or working in the mines (men and boys).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Kill It And Leave This Town

Director – Mariusz Wilczynski– 2020 – Poland – 88m

****1/2

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

From its opening of a man smoking in the dark to its closing image of giants tied down on a beach like felled Gullivers in Lilliput, this is awash with the sort of gloomy imagery readily associated with East European art pictures. That’s not to say it isn’t highly effective though. Set partly in a grey, heavily industrialised town where chimneys constantly belch out smoke and partly in a seaside resort, it has a narrative through line but constantly weaves around that with a series of episodes, dreams and memories. Nevertheless it possesses its own, coherent inner logic.

An old woman (Krystyna Janda) wishes her husband (Andrzej Chyra) goodbye as he takes their son Janek (Maja Ostaszewska) out. Later she visits the shops where, although she makes a point of explaining that she has the correct change, no one seems to be interested in actually serving her. Indeed, these are strange shops. Sometimes the fishmonger’s assistant (Malgorzata Kozuchowska) guts fish and sometimes she guts little humans who are around the same size.

At one point a man (Daniel Olbrychski) whose hat conceals that he has the head of a cat delivers an unsettling line about his purposes in the world to do with power, evil and good.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Shaman Sorceress
(무녀도)

Director – Ahn Jae-huun – 2020 – South Korea – 85m

***1/2

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

Rural woman Mohwa has had two children, first a boy Wook-yi then a girl Nang-yi, by two different fathers. She is a woman of contradictions: free spirited in love, more traditional in her everyday beliefs. She is revered locally as a healer, the person to whom people go when they have a sick relative. Mohwa is a shamaness who practises exorcisms on the sick to rid them of whatever evil spirits plague them. And she has an impressive track record. She’s also an alcoholic.

Since she is a long way down the economic food chain, she fears for Wook-yi’s future and packs him off to a Buddhist temple. His hitherto healthy younger sister falls ill and when she recovers three years later she has lost her hearing. Nang-yi also possesses considerable skill as a painter.

Wook-yi, meanwhile, hates the temple and leaves it to go to the more forward looking Seoul where he wanders into a Christian church and is converted. When he returns home, he talks to the largely silent Nang-yi about “who made human?” and “The One And Only God”, even getting her to say the words “One And Only God”.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The Passer-by
(De Passant)

Director – Pieter Coudyzer – 2020 – Belgium – 16m

*****

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

This is a film about our interconnectedness or lack of it. And impossible to review without spoilers – be warned before you read on. Thomas is a typical teenager studying for exams. He needs to be woken up in the morning by his mum or he’d lie in bed all day. Confronted with a textbook of maths equations, he’d rather keep drawing that portrait he’s been working on for his friend Karen. His mobile rings. It’s Karen. He agrees to take the drawing round and meet at the bus stop. He tries to sneak out, but mum spots him. He’s forced to admit it’s Karen. Don’t be long, his mum admonishes him.

And out he goes on his bicycle, stopping en route to chat to a neighbour working in his garden. A little further on an irritating, yappy little dog runs after him. Thomas moves across the road narrowly missing an oncoming fellow cyclist. He apologises. He keeps going. A car pulls out. He hits it, goes flying across the bonnet, lands on the pavement beyond. His drawing flies up into the air, carried on its currents.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Popeye The Sailor
Meets
Sindbad The Sailor

Director – Dave Fleischer – 1936 – US – 16m – colour – Oscar nominated

*****

Currently streaming on MUBI.

A rare, two reeler, colour outing for the Fleischer brothers’ Popeye, this removes him from his usual urban environment to an island populated with fabulous monsters – the opening features snakes, lions, a dragon and a vulture before we meet self-proclaimed “The Most Remarkable Fellow”, credited in the cast as Sindbad The Sailor although anyone familiar with other Flesicher Popeye cartoons will recognise him as regular villain Bluto. Sindbad sings a song asking the rhetorical question who this extraordinary fellow is, culminating in Popeye’s voice unexpectedly singing “Popeye The Sailor Man”, from which springs the film’s subsequent dramatic conflict. Talking about a shackled two headed giant Sindbad also references King Kong, released three years earlier and an obvious influence on the remote island with caves and incredible beasts seen here.

(MUBI’s source print print is missing a little bit of the opening credits, so you might want to hit pause on the single credits page detailing the cast before it vanishes after a few seconds. Otherwise, the print is in pretty decent condition.)

When Sindbad sends a giant bird to scuttle Popeye’s ship and kidnap the woman (Olive Oyl), the bird’s take off is animated less like a bird and more like a nineteen thirties aircraft that struggles to leave the ground.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Movies Shorts

The Battle Of San Romano

Director – Georges Schwizgebel – 2017 – Switzerland – 2m 26s

*****

The Battle Of San Romano is the fourth of 13 Original Short Films in the Annecy Festival 2020’s selection for We Are One: A Global Film Festival.

This film is based on the eponymous painting by Paulo Uccello in London’s National Gallery which has produced this helpful filmed talk about it. The painting’s subject matter is a 1432 battle between two regional Italian armies. The camera as we know it today didn’t exist at that time and had it done so, Uccello might anyway not have been very interested in using it to record an historical record as such. He seems to be more interested in constructing representational images, forms, and the illusion of three dimensional space.

What interests Schwizgebel is not so much the subject of the painting but the painting itself. It’s a study of the painting in much the same way that painters make studies of subjects with a view to exploring them, perhaps for use in a larger composition. Whether he is employing animation in quite the right medium is debatable. When I say medium, I mean that of the short film.

This short feels less like a film with a beginning, middle and end and more like a cycling loop of images which could go on for ever, so much so that I’ve found myself going back to it and re-watching in whole or in part.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Live Action Movies Shorts

The Uncertain Kingdom

Twenty shorts

The Uncertain Kingdom
Various UK directors
Certificate 15, 20 x ten minutes approximately
*****
Released online from 1 June: Amazon, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Google Play, and iTunes.

Why watch one film when you can watch 20?

The Uncertain Kingdom is an amazing collection of shorts covering various aspects of contemporary UK life before the Covid-19 crisis. Most are around ten minutes, with the shortest under three and the longest just over 20. There’s not one duff film in there. The films’ separate stories span such art forms as animation, dance, documentary and drama and such issues as colonialism, healing, heritage and class.

I review The Uncertain Kingdom for Reform.

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The Big Snit

Director – Richard Condie – 1985 – Canada – 10 mins

*****

Both sweet and funny. The first five minutes look like exactly where we are now under the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s basically the story of an old married couple who not only love each other dearly but also get on one another’s nerves. He looks at her Scrabble tiles while she’s out of the room. He is obsessed with sawing and tunes in to the TV Show, ‘Sawing For Teens’. She, meanwhile, compulsively removes her eyes from her face and shakes them.

Five minutes in, neither of them are watching when an emergency announcement interrupts regular TV programming. If the first five minutes are about a couple isolated in their home, the second five are an end of the world scenario with nuclear missiles flying through the sky and people panicking outside in the streets. Our central couple are, however, blissfully unaware of this, caught up as they are in their own domestic squabble. Richard Condie’s drawings, colour and overall visual sense are an absolute delight and the film is hilarious. Ten minutes well spent.

Nominated for Best Animated Short at the 1985 (58th) Oscars.

Free to watch on the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) channel.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Live Action Movies Shorts

La Jetée

Director – Chris Marker – 1962 – France – Cert. PG – 28m

*****

This movie has been resonating around my head these last weeks of the COVID-19 crisis as pertinent to where we are at present.

La Jetée / The Pier remains unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, black and white still images with voice over (which means that the English language dub, excerpted below, works just as well as the French language original). Little bits of it are really tough to watch in our current situation. For me, watching it again helps me deal with where we are right now. It’s about grief, about a world we’ve lost, to which we can never go back. It’s a film that regularly and rightly crops up on critics’ lists of the best films ever made. At the time of writing this, the film reads differently from the way it did three months previously. Not for everyone at the present time, but if you’re up for it, highly recommended.

Watch the opening minute below:

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

First Love
(Hatsukoi,
初恋)

Director – Takashi Miike – 2019 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 108m

*****

A boxer with no fear of death. Japanese yakuza, Chinese triads. A bag of drugs. A girl sold into prostitution. Miike orchestrates his potent cocktail with pace, panache and energy – cinemas Friday, February 14th, home video Monday, February 24th

And yet, as its release date implies, First Love is also a Valentine’s Day-friendly date movie. Not, admittedly, your average date, but Miike has never been your average director. High-profile titles released in the West like Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer and Yakuza Apocalypse give an certain idea of what he’s about – life, death and gangsters. This is only one facet of a career which also boasts samurai epics and a musical. If you count his made-for-video features of the early 1990s, Miike has now made over a hundred films. Many are highly entertaining and one or two, such as Audition, the sweet romantic film that turns into a terrifying horror thriller, might justifiably be termed great. First Love may not quite be Audition, but it’s arguably his best film for years… [Read more]

Full review at All The Anime.