Magic Atlas

An empire on one side, an old magician and a young orphan on the other. And a magic atlas that passes from the magician to the young Xiao Zhi. They are both in prison, as they disturb the order of the empire of Luocha. It is an order made of oblivion, where people are just a mass of subjects under corrupt rulers, while the two individual heroes should bring memory and consciousness. These are the ingredients of a story of (im)possible emancipation from totalitarianism.

The force of this story, between fairy tale and contemporary chronicle, lies in the absolutely original aesthetics that Sun Xun infuses into it. His animated world includes a traditional medium like the woodcut technique and 3D animation at the same time. He discharges ten years of collective work onto the screen and surely gets an astonished “wow!” out of his audiences. Our wonder does not only spring from the impressive craftsmanship of the mixture of techniques, but also from the heterogeneous style of the images, where traditional Chinese – and Japanese – drawing, together with German Expressionist painting, seems to prevail.

This peculiar aesthetic mixture brings old and modern worlds together and is clearly meant to express the internal tensions of modernisation. The empire of Luocha fetishises coal and thus champions extractivism, but it also champions the surveillance society of today through the invasive presence of machine automation in human life. Magic Atlas can be considered an Orwellian, 1984-like contemporary tale – with explicit references to the current Chinese “empire” – that resumes tropes from the first industrialisation to the most recent forms of digitalisation.

The positive values that offset this pessimistic line – fantasy, awareness, knowledge, memory – do not contradict the globalist thread of the criticised totalitarianism. The magic atlas conveys comprehension and enlightenment, but it still represents a globalist endeavour. Furthermore, the incredible challenge of producing such an animated film – a Gesamtkunstwerk whose elements, short films, drawings and installations, have already been spread across film festivals and art exhibitions – is also coherent with this globalist endeavour. In Sun Xun’s cosmos, beyond the oppressive empire of Luocha, there would probably be another empire, a more comprehensive and liberal one, that welcomes magic and individuality. As with every ambitious global vision, Magic Atlas will be both disturbing and fascinating.