Director – Rémi Chayé – 2020 – France – 85m
****
A young girl dresses as a man to survive in the Wild West in this extraordinary 2D, colour animated film – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival
Martha Jane Cannary is travelling across the US in a wagon, part of a larger convoy, with her father and her two younger siblings Lena and Elijah. Leading the train is Abraham, an austere and traditional man who isn’t good at taking criticism. Martha Jane has frequent arguments with his son Ethan. Her dad Robert is generally looked down upon, a situation scarcely helped by his wagon’s wheel coming off on a hillside road causing the convoy to grind to a halt or his attempt to lasso a horse to show that he is skilful which ends in his getting two broken ribs and a broken leg when the horse gets out of control.
With her dad unconscious in the back of their wagon, she is assigned Ethan as driver and manages to persuade him to let her try driving. She also borrows a pair of her dad’s jeans as she finds them much easier to get around in than the dress she’s supposed to wear. Soon, the company are joined by a US Cavalry scout Samson who helps the convoy with its navigation rides beside her as a driving coach. Abraham’s poor navigational skills have however been shown up and he’s far from happy.
When Samson leaves under a cloud as various goods go missing, she follows but loses her way and falls in with a boy Jonas who initially steals her horse. The two children end up working for Madame Moustache’s gold mine. Martha Jane returns to the wagon train just in time to rescue Ethan’s wagon from disaster when it’s hit by a runaway, rolling log, calling herself Calamity Jane, a girl unusually capable of looking after herself.
With very little known about the early life of the real Calamity Jane, much if not all of the plot here is fiction. That doesn’t stop it being fascinating. As pictured here, Martha Jane is a girl who recognises that her gender is restricted by conventional mores so starts cross-dressing to take advantage of the life that’s on offer for the opposite sex. Although when she meets Madame Moustache she sees an example of a woman living as a woman but getting what she wants, in this case running a mining business that would normally be seen as a male preserve.
Her contemporaries on the wagon train are unremarkable young girls who know their place and don’t step out of line. Martha Jane is the one who uses a lasso to rescue a small girl from a potentially fatal encounter with a rattlesnake while the others are both in awe of her and think she’s a bit weird. The Wild West was clearly a time when there were numerous opportunities for self-advancement for those who wanted it and were willing to take risks. This is an early portrait of someone who did.
What you wouldn’t know from reading the above, although it’s pretty obvious from the images, is that this movie is created not in live action but in 2D animation. Borrowing from both French Impressionism and American painting, it boasts arguably the most impressive use if colour you’ll ever see in a movie. It seems that the ground or vegetation upon it and cloud formations in the sky can be rendered in almost any colours or shades depending on the time of night or day or the mood of the characters on the screen at any given time.
The visuals here are constructed in large blocks of flat colour with no outline, very pleasing to the eye. Perhaps wisely, there’s no attempt to evoke brushstrokes or impasto or any other such physical painterly device, yet the range of the colour palette is so extraordinary and vibrant that it’s as if you’re watching a constantly shifting painting by a great master, a truly impressive achievement.
At once a revisionist Western about the fate of young pre-teen girls and a colour visual tour de force, this cries out to be seen. If anything, though, its strongest scenes are those on the wagon train in the first half hour or so: once Martha Jane leaves the train and goes out on her own, the film seems somehow less focused. Which is a pity, because the subject matter is fascinating, the characters engaging and the ravishing visuals utterly stunning.
Calamity. A Childhood Of Martha Jane Cannary plays in the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival onsite. The film is not available in the festival’s online version.
Trailer (French language):
Awards
Friday, April 16th 2021
Nominated for Best Indie Feature and two other awards.
Festivals
2021
Annecy Animation Festival onsite edition
Festival Trailer:
2020
Annecy Animation Festival special online edition:
Monday, June 15th to Tuesday, June 30th.
Festival trailer: