Explore by #Festival Fantoche Baden
The Timekeepers of Eternity
A long video essay?
There is a Stephen King novella, The Langoliers (1990), from which Tom Holland produced a 2-episode TV mini-series of 180 minutes (1995), from which Aristotelis Maragkos edited and animated his The Timekeepers of Eternity. This stratification of stories reverberates in Maragkos’ use of ripping papers as principal ideas of animation, where the screen is constantly split into two or more layers. More embedding elements: the aesthetic of the split screen not only allows the shrinking of the story but also refers to the Nineties, and the idea of ripping papers generates from Holland’s series itself, for its main character, Craig Toomey, uses the ripping of papers in order to soothe his paranoid hallucinations. Is Maragkos’ film nothing more than a re-editing exercise on a previous film that effectively has the chance to overcome its narrative weaknesses through a more compact “collaged” version?
An alternative reading: The Timekeepers of Eternity is rather a classical video essay, where an original videographic idea superposes and critically comments on old film footage? In this case, the specificity of Maragkos’ film would be the task of respecting and newly interpreting the story in its linear and accomplished form – a constraint that is rarely present in video essays. The other specific aspect of the film, partly a consequence of the first one, is the important length of the video essay because one hour of essayistic interventions on a previous footage is certainly not easy to see, but The Timekeepers of Eternity is a very enjoyable film indeed. Now, the main feature responsible for this is actually the original intriguing plot by King/Holland, and here lies the principal weakness of the film - to my eyes - if it is interpreted as a video essay. After 10-15 minutes one completely “digests” the formal device of Maragkos’ animation, which thereby becomes completely transparent, letting emerge the original plot as the only leading focus of the viewer’s attention. In this perspective, the film amounts to a sheer video re-view of (the summary of) Holland’s series.
The Timekeepers of Eternity | Film | Aristotelis Maragkos | GR 2021 | 62’ | Fantoche – International Animation Film Festival Baden 2022
Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish
Lei Lei opts for the aesthetic of collage in order to deliver his family saga, almost as if he could stick together what the Chinese Cultural Revolution has broken up, but the collage is also displayed as an expansion of the photographic layer from which the film begins its archeologic work: animation is there to expand and give flesh to the frozen memories of black and white pictures. It is a colourful but also abstract flesh, which insists more on the idea of historic stratification than on the dynamic of movement. One of the most recurring moving elements will be nothing but smoke, that is something destined to disappear…
The recorded voices of the father and the grandfather secure a personal perspective on History, which is per se a critical statement against any collectivist discourse. If this formal choice appears as a gesture of resistance, another formal choice seems to be the expression of resignation, insofar as the use of a puzzling editing architecture creates a chronologically scattered storytelling that makes us experience the irreparable fragmentation of the family.
The heavy use of symbols and the very slow pace of the narration then contributes to make us experience the 104 minutes of the film (certainly unusual for an animation feature) as even longer. Now, this can be taken as a weakness or as the occasion to experience - for better or for worse - the monumentality that is probably deeply at stake in Lei Lei’s motivation and sensitivity towards a both personal and historical issue.
Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish | Film | Lei Lei | USA-NL 2022 | 104’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2022, Fantoche – International Animation Film Festival Baden 2022
Old Man Cartoon Movie
George Orwell’s allegorical novella Animal Farm has certainly played a role – at least formally – in the conception of Mikk Mägi and Oskar Lehemaa’s Old Man Cartoon Movie, for behind the amusing adventures of three children by their grandfather’s farm, there is a precise allegorical scheme. A “vertical” society lead by a charismatic figure, a sort of political boss exploiting the lower class in order to nourish a passive middle class, in the double version of the reactionary and violent tyrant (a Soviet despot?) and the drunk and popular autocrat (a contemporary populist despot?). Be them two legendary “milk men”, the village people and the cows, the scheme works perfectly to teach the urban children (i.e. the new generation, or the viewers themselves) the «real life» of countryside, the real relationship of power in society.
This sort of theatrum mundi is precise enough to include secondary social groups like the technology freaks, the hippies or the environment/animal activists. This last category actually plays a crucial role, as one of the children – the hero the viewers will identify with – champions their cause, but not without embodying also some laughable traits that show the filmmakers’ wide angle sarcasm. Yes, for Old Man Cartoon Movie seems to spare no one from its volcanic teasing activity.
Nonetheless, this is also a simple animation film to laugh along with, which entertains also, through a quite conventional drama structure and a pulsating tempo. Therefore, I would suggest it for family screenings, in spite of – or because of – its acid political and moral incorrectness. The moral ecologism is so overtly exhibited that a simplistic first viewing will simply enjoy it, and a more refined second viewing will capture its self-criticism. Even a crystal clear sexual allusion at the peak of the improbable adventure will serve at the same time to pitilessly represent the religious power as opportunist and empty. Dark anthropological pessimism dressed in sparkling coloured clothes: such a cinematic item is definitely a rarity!
Old Man Cartoon Movie | Animation | Mikk Mägi, Oskar Lehemaa | EST 2019 | 88’ | Festival Fantoche Baden 2020
La fameuse invasion des ours en Sicile
Il film di animazione La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia è rivolto ad un pubblico di ogni età. Infatti si basa sulla favola omonima di Dino Buzzati (1945) che sa catturare l'attenzione di grandi e piccoli, perché dotata di diversi livelli di lettura: una semplice fiaba che nasconde interpretazioni a livello sociale, politico, filosofico, molto attuali.
Non c'è un vero lieto fine: gli orsi affamati e in cerca del figlio del loro re, Leonzio, lasciano le montagne per scendere a valle, dove abitano gli uomini, ma sono respinti da loro con pregiudizio e ostilità, pur essendo innocui. Con apertura e resilienza gli orsi riescono a cavarsela e a trovare stratagemmi per sopravvivere, fino a riuscire a regnare pacificamente insieme agli uomini. L'equilibrio non dura, perché vizi e difetti degli uomini intaccano alcuni orsi, che alla fine decidono di ritornare ai monti.
L'illustratore Lorenzo Mattotti, sceneggiatore e regista del film, rimane piuttosto fedele all'omonima opera letteraria, realizzando una coproduzione italo-francese, che è un piacere per gli occhi, spumeggiante per l'inventiva, per la costante sincronizzazione del suono al movimento come nelle animazioni Disney dei primordi, per la rappresentazione di paesaggi, luoghi, oggetti, dettagli, tanto fantasiosi quanto ricchi di cromatismi, di riferimenti alla cultura siciliana e dell'Europa meridionale più in generale. Accentuano il lavoro di radicamento spazio-temporale le musiche originali di René Aubry, che utilizza anche strumenti del folclore siciliano per le sue composizioni, e le voci dei personaggi, affidate – nella versione italiana – a Andrea Camilleri (il vecchio orso), Antonio Albanese (Gedeone), Toni Servillo (Leonzio), Corrado Guzzanti (Salnitro).
La cura delle immagini, disegnate una per una con grande lavoro da un'équipe di professionisti (i movimenti dei personaggi animati sono stati costruiti a partire dall'osservazione di quelli degli attori scelti) ha realizzato quasi un piccolo capolavoro nel suo genere. Peccato che il regista abbia assecondato troppo spesso la dimensione spettacolare offerta dall'intreccio, lasciando spazio a scene di combattimenti, inseguimenti e mostri spaventosi di varia natura, di cui l'immaginario delle anime è purtroppo già pieno, e senza le quali il film non avrebbe affatto perso in innovazione e capacità affabulatoria.
La fameuse invasion des ours en Sicile | Film | Lorenzo Mattotti | FR-IT 2019 | 81’ | Fantoche Baden 2019
Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres
Away
At the presentation of the film at the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival in Baden, we discovered that the making of Away has been a one man show. In a titanic enterprise, which somehow also ensured a certain degree of freedom and economy, Gints Zilbalodis did everything alone. Equally titanic seems the enterprise of his young protagonist, a teenager surviving an air crash accident, alone on an island, at the furthest point from the only town on said island. A slowly-moving black giant wants to kill him and the story of Away is the adventure of his escape from death in search of safety among the humans.
With this minimalist line of narrative, we are immediately projected onto an allegoric reading of the film, which will accompany us in every moment of the story. The accident as a birth; the choice between a paradise of solitude and the risk of facing death in order to join the other human beings as a coming-of-age dilemma; the mercy for the weakest animals as the ideal of solidarity; the breath of death as a memento of never giving up, etc.
The more or less philosophical or moral thread of Away constitutes only one layer of the film, for the visual layer, with its gorgeous aesthetics, is constantly rivalling any conceptual one. Actually, the conceptual and the aesthetic join together in a “vertical” dimension, where the abysm of existence is echoed through breath-taking landscapes. These landscapes, always great and beautiful, stress the disproportion between the individual and his world, actually making them “sublime” – in the Kantian sense. The absence of words, the inexorably approaching death, the both wide and isolated world, which acts as attractive and inhuman at the same time, the very (possibly deliberately too) repetitive music: all of this contributes to a metaphysical experience.
For this reason, Away is able to awaken the deepest feelings of childhood. More than focussing on the moral wisdom of mythology, Zilbalodis’ animation film expresses rather the sensations that a child can feel hearing a mythological tale, or the sensations that an adult can feel in a dream – the recurrent scenes of the black giant approaching the escaping character hints at a typical situation of dreams. After this intense experience that only animation can convey on a screen, it will be difficult to come back to the norms of reality. For me it remains open whether the young protagonist will find the coveted safety among the humans and their town. I would have probably liked to continue to wander through the sensuous and metaphysical landscapes, even if the death breathes down my neck…
Away | Film | Animation | Gints Zilbalodis | LV 2019 | 74’ | Fantoche Baden 2019
Ce magnifique gâteau!
Screenings in November 2021 at Kino Rex Bern
À travers ce moyen-métrage d’animation, Emma de Swaef et Marc James Roels font des premières années de colonisation du Congo par les Belges, commençant par son roi Léopold II qui en fit sa propriété privée ( ! ), un portrait caractérisé par le caprice et l’avidité, dominé par l’éphémère. A travers des personnages improbables et représentatifs à la fois – du roi lui-même aux marchands et aventuriers belges, jusqu’au serveurs et esclaves locaux – se profile un monde de violence, mais en même temps d’étonnement. La stupidité et la mesquinerie semblent contaminer tout un peuple – le peuple belge – qui semble osciller au hasard entre naïveté et cruauté.
Le duo d’animateurs a choisi des matériaux doux pour leurs petites figurines d’étoffe, les couleurs sont tendres, la lumière chaude et envoutante, la musique de la fin du XIXème siècle mélodieuse et rêveuse : aussi par des palais au décor luxueux et une nature luxuriante, ils créent une atmosphère idyllique, presque paradisiaque, qui contraste violemment avec la réalité d’exploitation et de méchanceté d’un colonialisme représenté comme improvisé et fondamentalement ignorant. En effet, il ne s’agit de rien d’autre que du secret de Polichinelle de l’exotisme colonial, où contemplation et prédation se côtoient dangereusement – encore aujourd’hui !
Sans pour cela diminuer la portée d’un jugement justement dur contre les horreurs de la colonisation belge, de Swaef et Roels réussissent à transposer le récit aussi sur un niveau existentiel où, par la multiplication des accidents les plus banals (face auxquels nous ne savons pas trop si rire ou pleurer), la fragilité de l’existence implique tout le monde dans une sorte de nivellement universel. La mort et le rêve semblent transvaser l’une dans l’autre et créer le seul territoire où l’homme retrouve la dignité dans les sentiments, et le plaisir de l’imagination.
Ce magnifique gateau ! | Film | Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels | BE-FR-NL 2018 | 44’ | Festival Fantoche Baden 2018
Haarig
Anka Schmids neuster Film hat die Intelligenz, eine spezifische und ungewöhnliche Perspektive einzunehmen, um ihre eigene Geschichte zu erzählen: die Perspektive der Haare. Eine eingeschränkte Perspektive, die tatsächlich eine Erweiterung unserer Erfahrung bedeutet und die die Entdeckung einer Dimension des Körpers ermöglicht, welche sich als entschieden weniger marginal herausstellt, als es scheint. Haarig kreuzt persönliche Daten mit historischen: So wird mit der autobiografischen Geschichte auch die westliche Geschichte der Haare in den letzten Jahrzehnten erzählt. Deswegen ist das eigentliche Thema des Films die Beziehung zwischen Individuum und Gesellschaft, zwischen persönlichem Ausdruck und einer Kommunikation durch soziale Codes – ein Thema, das auch in der Aneinanderreihung von öffentlichen und privaten Archivbildern reflektiert wird. Mehr als für die Vertiefung des Themas überzeugt Haarig für seine formale Behandlung, durch die veranschaulichende Nutzung von Musik, die Verwendung einer humorvollen Off-Stimme und einer nie redundanten Animation. Die kompositorische Dimension des Films wird ständig hervorgehoben und verleiht dem Film die Frische und Dynamik eines Filmessays.
Haarig | Film | Anka Schmid | Fantoche Baden 2017, Solothurner Filmtage 2018
