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Animation Features Movies Music

The Colors Within
Kimi no Iro,
きみの色,
lit. Your Color)

Director – Naoko Yamada – 2024 – Japan – Cert. PG – 101m

*****

A Catholic schoolgirl with synaesthesia inadvertently forms a rock band who find themselves playing a gig at her school – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

That’s the Serenity Prayer, and it opens this remarkable story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school as she prays it to a statue of Mary in the school chapel. A scene of her as a small girl attending the dance class, and scenes of her seeing other pupils in the corridor, are rendered in vivid, blinding colour where bright white light constantly threatens to engulf the pastel shades in which the girl sees. For more on synaesthesia, see A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (Mark Cousins, 2024).

If you were to land in the middle of this film with no context, for a frame, or a scene (drawn animation parlance for a single shot), you could be forgiven for thinking there was something wrong with the print, or the colour balance. I am immediately reminded of the reviewer who said of Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947) that the film was so visually perfect that it could be shown out of focus and upside down and the audience would still be enraptured by its kinetic abstract colour properties.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Invasion
Of The Body
Snatchers

Director – Don Siegel – 1956 – US – Cert. PG – 80m

*****

The classic, paranoid SF outing about the residents of a small, American town being replaced by conformist, emotionless duplicates – on BFI Blu-ray from Monday, October 25th

This is an incomplete review, currently in progress…

Made in the middle of Hollywood’s 1950s B-movie Sci-Fi boom, this movie was made by Don Siegel who previously made hard-boiled crime thrillers after cutting his teeth as an editor of montage sequences in, among other things, Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) with a striking script and a strong cast headed by Kevin McCarthy and, in her first starring role, Dana Wynter, which also includes Carolyn Jones who would later achieve fame playing Morticia Addams in The Addams Family TV series (creator David Levy, 1964).

Based on a Colliers Magazine serial by Jack Finney, it’s built around the highly potent idea of human beings being replaced by emotionless duplicates who operate as a communal whole rather than individual people. It’s often been read as a metaphor for the anti-Communist McCarthy witch hunts of the period, but as noted in the fascinating documentary Sleep No More, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers Revisited (2006), the left thought it was a satire on the right while the right thought it was a satire on the left.… Read the rest