photorealism Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Flow
(Straume)
(2024)

Director – Gints Zilbalodis – 2024 – Belgium, France, Latvia – Cert. U – 84m

A cat must survive rising water levels as they engulf both the countryside and cities – remarkable, dialogue-free, computer animated feature from the BFI London Film Festival 2024 which runs from Wednesday, October 9th to Sunday, October 20th in cinemas and on BFI Player and then out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 1st, 2025

LFF: Sun 13 + Q&A 20:15 Curzon Soho, Sat 19 11:30 BFI IMAX, Sun 20 14:30 Curzon Soho Screen 1

Like his earlier Away (2019), Zilbalodis’ new CG animated movie features creatures who don’t speak as well as an incredible music score. The central character is a cat, and you’d be forgiven, after years of animated films about cats in which they talk, for expecting the same, but Zilbalodis isn’t interested in anthropomorphised talking animals. He’s clearly interested in animals, and in characters, but the cat here has been derived from watching and studying real life cats and their behaviour in the real world. There’s a long history of this in drawn animation, typified by the classic Disney films, where it was all about what you could achieve with a paper and pencil, studying from life, making drawings of characters move.… Read the rest

Archipelago
(Archipel)

Director – Félix Dufour-Laperrière – 2021 – Canada – 72m

****

A journey along an estuary traversing its archipelago, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, a trip into an obscure territory of the mind – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival in the Official Competition Contrechamp section

Defying easy categorisation, this is a conversation between a woman on a journey and a man trying to convince her of her non-existence. The woman’s shape first appears as a framing device – through the moving shape that defines her we see locations, places and more. Eventually we see her too, as her representation changes from a moving window shape to a simple animated line drawing defining her features against what can be seen through the window of her shape.

Numerous elements jostle for attention as the film proceeds. On one level, it’s a journey along the Gulf of St Lawrence in the French-speaking part of Canada, the estuary of the river which connects the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. A train journey is represented by the view through a carriage window. There are numerous islands, some of which may be real. There are clips from black and white and occasionally colour travelogue documentary films.… Read the rest