How strange it must have been to be tasked with adapting Wes Anderson's eccentric and idiosyncratic live-action style to the animation required for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Mark Gustafson was the brave soul who took on that task when Henry Selick left the project to animate Coraline. During a Q&A session following the San Francisco International Animation Festival screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Animation Director Gustafson recalled how Anderson's unyielding dedication to his vision for the film made him very uncomfortable as a professional animator. Though out of his element, Anderson never allowed the once-accepted boundaries of stop-motion animation to compromise his vision. It's a good thing too, as it's Anderson's background in live-action film that most likely makes Fantastic Mr. Fox feel so different from other popular animated fare.
Based on the beloved book by Roald Dahl, Fox is the story of the titular Mr. Fox, a retired chicken thief who risks his happy home life for one last hit on the three meanest farmers in town: Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Spying on their farms from his tree-home, Fox concocts a secret scheme to help himself to their supply of chickens, ducks and cider. It's a breezy set-up and it initially feels like the story might have painted itself into a corner, but it's soon clear that Mr. Fox is less concerned with retaining a tight plot than with creating a rapid sense of forward progression. I'm unfamiliar with the source material, and the slapdash story might have been unavoidable, but it's a negligible concern when the editing and dialogue are as tight as they are in this film.
As a game of one-upmanship begins between Fox and the farmers, we start to see evidence of Anderson's non-traditional approach to animation. Characters often are jarringly replaced with different models—though recognizable, their sizes and shapes look noticeably different—and little imperfections in backgrounds and character design are perceptible throughout. Everything is very DIY and it's clear the filmmakers have chosen to focus on creating a sense of wonder and whimsy over polish and predictability. Instead of pulling the viewer out of the film, the concept of enhancing the gaudiness on screen only adds to its playfulness.
The voice-actors all are obviously in their element working with Anderson; many culled from previous films the director has made. George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Jason Schwartzman are ideal choices for the Fox family, and Dumbledore himself—Michael Gambon—makes for a devilish foil as the most cunning of the three farmers, Mr. Bean. Even with lock-on voice talent, the film is never overly reliant on them, and uses affecting facial close-ups, expressions and silences, which account for a lot of the film's humor.
Though he had little experience as an animator, Fantastic Mr. Fox is recognizable as a "Wes Anderson movie" through and through. I'm not so sure the zany approach used here would have fared as well in live-action—it's a lot more Life Aquatic wackiness than Tenenbaums introspection; but, it bears recalling that Life Aquatic's focus on humor over emotion marked that film as a critical failure. Mileage may vary, but I found Anderson's oddball take on a children's film a blast to watch. As an animated film it feels both daring and fresh.
Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.
By and large, animation gets a bum rap. The average filmgoer long ago decided that the medium catered either to kids or art house snobs, and Hollywood has spent the last few decades marketing accordingly. Luckily, it's a medium that also has some of the most fervent fans—ones who endlessly support the films and keep the animated flame burning—such as the San Francisco Film Society, which will host the San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF) November 11-15, 2009 at the Landmark Embarcadero Center Cinema. SFIAF's fourth edition boasts four narrative features, a selection of shorts, and live events; a great way to become better acquainted with the overlooked genre if you're unfamiliar, and—if you're already on the hook—an opportune chance to see some of the best animated films of the year on a big screen.
The biggest draws will likely be SFIAF's features: First up, The Fantastic Mr Fox. Based on the eponymous novel by Roald Dahl, Wes Anderson's latest journeys away from live-action but retains all of the director's trademark eccentricities thanks to voice-acting from many of the actors who frequent his hit films. Shot entirely in stop-motion, Fox is the story of the titular Mr. Fox, a retired crook who risks his happy home life for one last hit on the three meanest farmers in town. Oceans 11 with George Clooney as a fox?! I can't confirm such a fantastic allegation, but I'll be attending this screening myself and my fingers are crossed. The film may open wide just a week or so later, but why not see it early and think up a swell question to ask Anderson (who is expected to attend)?
Next on the schedule is the irreverent Belgian import Panique au Village / A Town Called Panic. Twitch teammate Todd Brown writes: " 'Juvenile' and 'absurd' are perfectly good descriptors when talking about Panique, though only if they are accompanied by 'brilliant' and 'hysterical'." I've been anticipating Panique for quite some time since quickly discovering the English dub on Atom Films. Each episode follows the adventures of three toy figures—Cowboy, Indian and Horse—who share a house. Its simple setup has a big part in creating the sort of universal comedy that has crossed culture lines, the series having swiftly gained support in the UK from Aardman Animation (the studios behind Wallace and Gromit). Will the five-minute episodes translate well to feature length? Early word leans towards the positive.
A new Mamoru Oshii is always big news for animation fans, though you might be surprised to hear his latest is a samurai biopic. Stepping back from the usual action and sci-fi fare of previous efforts such as Storm Riders and Ghost in the Shell, Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai is more a detailed examination of the political climates that conspired to create the man who became the legendary samurai Musashi, rather than a straightforward story about his life. Using an anachronistic narrator to steer the film from sounding too much like an animated essay, Oshii's script explores both the myths and the facts but ultimately comes no closer to understanding the true identity of the mysterious samurai. Even when the film glorifies more than enlightens, Oshii's fascination with his subject shines, making Musashi an engrossing exercise in style and structure. At Twitch, Todd Brown stages his complaints while Simon Laperriere considers "ideal" the film's description as "an animated encyclopedia … since the film uses a structure similar to a book covering a wide variety of subjects all linked more or less with the same theme."
Closing the fest is Tarik Saleh's Metropia, a near-future mystery flick starring Vincent Gallo as a dissatisfied call-center employee who begins hearing voices after using a new brand of shampoo. As a slow-burn sci fi noir, Metropia is often cryptic and scattershot; but, anyone familiar with the genre knows better than to expect events to unfold in any other way. Saleh delivers enough intrigue and double-crosses, and such an interesting style of animation—big-eyed photorealistic characters that move almost like marionettes—that the plot's contrivances are negligible. At Twitch, Todd Brown writes: "Metropia fits beautifully into the canon of dystopic literature, a grim but thoroughly plausible vision of the future, a future in which progress leads to squalor rather than prosperity" whereas—though Simon Laperriere admires Metropia's "astounding" animation—he concludes the effort "disappoints."
If shorts are more your thing, Saturday brings a few compilations. The most eye-catching is The Best of Annecy (marking selections from The Annecy International Animated Film Festival), and Walt Disney's Alice Comedies, a selection gleaned from the 56 classic shorts made between 1923 and 1927 that helped launch the Disney Studios.
Of related interest: indieWIRE has published the 20 films submitted for consideration for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards®, including The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Panique au Village / A Town Called Panic.
Cross-published on Ornery-Crosby and Twitch.
Add one more to November's Filmfest Smackdown; but, with the coming year being an open window into Philippine and Filipino Cinema, I thought it would warrant to get a head start.
The Filipino American Center of the San Francisco Public Library in association with the Filipino Arts & Cinema International (FACINE) present the 16th Annual Filipino American Cine Festival on Friday, November 20, 1:00-5:00PM and Saturday, November 21, 10:00AM-5:00PM in the Main Library, Lower Level, Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove), free to the public. The FACINE festival is the longest-running festival of its kind in North America that showcases independent short films produced by Filipino American artists and other films made in the Philippines. FACINE is a nonprofit media arts organization that aims to promote and develop Filipino American cinema.
FACINE's Artistic Director Mauro Feria Tumbocon, Jr. has programmed the following screenings:
Friday, November 20, 1:00-5:00PM
PROGRAM 1: Our stories from the 'hood
1:00-2:00PM
Legend (Mark Villegas, dir & prod; 5 min, 2009)
Got Book? Auntie Helen's Gift of Books (Florante Pete Ibanez, dir; UCLA Department of World Arts & Culture / Center for EthnoCommunications, prod; 8:45 min, 2005). This short documentary concerns Helen Brown, the founder of the Pilipino American Reading Room & Library.
Sounds of a New Hope (Eric Tandoc, dir; Mass Movement & Sine Patriotiko, prods; 41 min, 2009). Director Tandoc follows Filipino American rap artist, Kiwi, through his work with youth both in the US and the Philippines where he uses music to raise political consciousness.
PROGRAM 2: In a weird, crazy world of my neighbors
2:00-3:00PM
The Reunion (Pio Candelaria, dir/prod; 3 min, 2009).
The San Miguel Family Reunion (Theophilus Jamal & Joel Rosal, dirs; MojaStudio & PhlipFLIX Productions, prods; 14:23 min, 2008).
Alice, Interrupted (Theophilus Jamal, dir; MojaStudio LLC, prod; 10 min, 2009).
Bunot / Husk (Ivy Universe Baldoza, dir/prod; 7:08 min, 2008).
Nekro (Crisostomo Juan Andaluz, dir; Carl and Carl Productions, prod; 19:01 min, 2008).
PROGRAM 3: Special Premiere US screening
3:00-5:00PM
Handumanan / Remembrance (Seymour Barros-Sanchez, dir; Red Room Productions, prod; 85 min, 2009). Filipina model/actress ChinChin Gutierrez stars as romance novelist faces the difficult changes in her career and life.
Saturday, November 21, 10:00AM-5:00PM
PROGRAM 4: The Filipino, undaunted
10:00–11:30AM
Gami dad Lumfwig / We, the Oppressed (Nerve Macaspac, dir; 32 min, 2008)—The indigenous peoples of the Philippines are still a people suffering from neglect and discrimination.
Kinulayang Kitil / Hand-painted feathers (Richard Legaspi, dir; Red Room Productions, prod; 24 min, 2009)—A young boy yearns to have his own painted chick believing that it can bring back the life of his father shot in a picket line.
The Momentary Enemy (Angel Velasco-Shaw, dir/prod; 24:30 min, 2008)—An experimental documentary that explores a century's worth of war rhetoric and filmic representation from the dawn of last century's Philippine-American War to Vietnam and the Iraq War. Features interviews with Reynaldo Ileto, Howard Zinn and Ninotchka Rosca.
PROGRAM 5: What of woman, herself empowered
11:30AM–12:30PM
Life Begins at O'Farrell Street (Peggy Peralta, dir/prod; 3 min, 2005).
Hello, My Name is Clarisse (Peggy Peralta, dir/prod; 3 min, 2005).
Killeg / Long life (Golda Mae Bao-ag Pay-ong, dir; University of Makati Film Society, prod; 9:52 min, 2008).
Soledad is Gone Forever (Mabel Valdivieso, dir; Cesar Viana Teague/Haiku Films, prod; 14 min, 2006).
Always Faithful (Sam Wellington, dir/prod; in association with South of Ten, Abyssinian Moon Productions, Palindrome Pictures, prods; Esperanza Catubig, star; 13 min, 2008).
PROGRAM 6: Special US Premiere screening
1:00-3:00PM
Puntod /Baby's tomb (Cesar Apolinario, dir; Arlyn de la Cruz/ADC Productions, prod; 111 min, 2009)—A daughter of Manila's slums dreams of having a dignified burial space for her mother, forges deep friendships with an old blind man and other children.
PROGRAM 7: Special US Premiere screening
3:00-5:00PM
Anacbanua / The child of the sun (Christopher Gozum, dir; Sine Caboloan, prod; 105 min, 2009)—The filmmaker's love letter to his province, Pangasinan, in text and stunning visuals. At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Francis Cruz provides a full-on rave review.
All films are either in English or in different Filipino languages (Tagalog, Bisaya, Pangasinan, etc.) with English subtitles. A short Q&A with filmmakers in attendance follows after all screenings.
Another week, another "found footage" horror film.
The Fourth Kind claims only half of its run-time is found footage, the rest is introduced by actress Mila Jovovich as elaborate dramatizations of real events that occurred in Nome, Alaska. I am always a bit wary when a film's tagline is "Based on a true story", but setting aside questions of legitimacy, I recognize that it was a risky endeavor to construct a movie from equal parts VHS tape and America's Most Wanted re-enactment.
In the secluded town of Nome, Jovovich does indeed play a real person, Abigail Taylor, a small-time therapist who recently lost her husband in an unsolved murder. Her husband, who had also been a therapist, was investigating a pattern in his patients suffering from insomnia and bad dreams, and Abigail is convinced that—by finishing his work—she can somehow understand his death. She begins by videotaping the sessions with her patients as they are put under hypnosis, and discovers that they all remember the same thing—waking up in the middle of the night with a big white owl sitting outside their window.
What it all means I won't divulge here, but I think the trailers are keen on making it clear that this is a film about alien abduction.
While Abigail unravels the mystery of the owl, director Olatunde Osunsanmi constantly switches back and forth between dramatization and purportedly real recorded footage, each time including captions to delineate the real people from the actors. It's obviously a device that has greatly enamored the filmmaker, but what begins as a novelty quickly becomes a distraction—at times up to four different points-of-view crowd the screen at once. Towards the end, Osunsanmi manages to confine the moments of videotape to key "scare" moments, relying on the shoddiness of the footage to lend an eerie authenticity to otherwise familiar moments, but disassociating the audience with fuzzy VCR-roll isn't the same as actually developing suspense.
Even as I decry it as a distracting gimmick, the juxtaposition of fact and fabrication remains the most interesting aspect of the film. It's wildly apparent that the filmmakers have put all their faith in the movie's dual footage premise at the expense of a story, and The Fourth Kind delivers an alien abduction experience that is about as rip-roaring as a late era X-Files episode—you get the feeling everyone is just going through the motions.
Is it real, is it fake? I suppose I could add the absence of a satisfying conclusion to the film's narrative offenses, but you've probably already figured out that a supposedly true film about alien abduction isn't going to contain proof of extraterrestrial life or you'd have heard about it by now.
Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.
How fortunate can a website be to have two of the Bay Area's best film writers offer previews of what I consider to be this weekend's winner of—as Michael Hawley aptly terms it—November's "filmfest smackdown." Film festivalism has never been more athletic or competitive!! Lay your bets, cinephiles!
The 3rd i San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival returns for its seventh edition November 5 to 8, with two nights apiece at the Roxie and Castro Theaters. Sure to be a highlight is Saturday's Castro revival of legendary producer/star Guru Dutt's 1960 Bollywood classic Full Moon (Chaudhvin Ka Chand). Set amongst the Muslim aristocracy of early 20th century Lucknow, this lushly photographed film follows a love triangle beset with comic misunderstanding, mistaken identity and ultimate tragedy. Any disappointment I had over the film's digital, rather the 35mm presentation, has been tempered with the announcement that Dutt's son Aran will be on hand to introduce the screening.
That night, 3rd i's Saturday at the Castro concludes with recent Bollywood hit My Heart Goes Hooray! (Kil Bole Hadippa!). Although this girls-just-wanna-play-cricket pic doesn't star Shahrukh Khan, I'm not exactly dreading 148 minutes of watching Shahid Kapoor (Rani Mukherjee in Drag King mode might be a different story).
And anyone with a taste for the wildly different won't want to miss Friday's late-night Roxie screening of Quick Gun Murugun. This ambitious masala mish-mash pits a gaily-garbed vegetarian caballero against a criminal carnivore—while spoofing vintage Bollywood, Spaghetti Westerns and a hundred other things. Expect a lot of cartoonish violence, special FX and in-jokes infinitum (plus a color-palate influenced by Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger).
There are several non-Bollywood narrative features in the line-up. Of the two I previewed I'm most enthusiastic about Bombay Summer. This moody, hang-loose Indian indie chronicles the evolving friendship between three Mumbai 20-somethings—Geeta, a graphic design company exec who still lives at home, Jaider, her coddled poet boyfriend, and Madan, a drug deliveryman and photographer who comes between them. In the dark, uneven British anti-family comedy Mad, Sad & Bad, three damaged adult siblings stumble through the weeks leading up to the death of their widowed, alcoholic mother. A 17-year-old Kashmiri boy's struggle to escape his fate is at the center of Bay Area director Tariq Tapa's neo-realist feature debut Zero Bridge. The film was just recently nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. The directors for all three of these films are expected to attend.
3rd i can be counted on to present some terrific documentaries, and this year is no exception. While I haven't previewed it, closing night film Yes Madam, Sir appears to be one not to miss. The film is about Kiran Bedi, India's first elite policewoman, and Variety's Richard Kuipers calls it "an enthralling chronicle of her brilliant, tempestuous career" in a full-on rave review. Both Kiran Bedi and the film's director, Megan Doneman, are scheduled to attend.
Of the three docs I've seen, I most strongly recommend Opening Night film Supermen of Malegaon, a charming story of cinema-obsessed textile mill workers making their own inspired version of Superman. Anyone who was blown away by Manufactured Landscapes' unearthly images of Bangladesh's "ship-breaking" industry will want to check out Iron Eaters, a sobering, multi-angled look at a back-breaking business that feeds an estimated three million Bangladeshis. The contradictory disconnect between "Kama Sutra India" and "no public kissing India" is the fascinating subject of Kaushik Mukherjee's brave documentary Love in India. Other docs in the fest include Warrior Boyz (South Asian gangs in Vancouver), Searching for Sandeep (Australian lesbian finds romance on-line) and Children of the Pyre (kids living off Varanasi's cremation industry).
Cross-published on Twitch.
All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray. November is here, and so is the most excellent 3rd i, or the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival. In its seventh year, 3rd i has become one of the must-go film festivals in the Bay Area, where you can catch up with outstanding selections from the "shorts, documentaries, and feature films from South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora, including India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Australia, Canada, Germany, UK and the USA." The great strength of this festival is its generous attention to independent works, while including classics and crowd-pleasing Bollywood, in an era when only the latter will guarantee a full house at the Castro Theatre. The festival opens at the Roxie Theater Thursday and Friday, November 5-6, then moves to the Castro through the weekend of November 7-8.
This year in previewing the festival I suspect I missed out on the crowd pleasers, which at any rate I hope to see on a bigger screen. I did see a number of documentaries—which tend to be my favorite—that I would enthusiastically recommend. I wasn't able to screen Yes Madam, Sir, whose topic—India's first policewoman—fascinated me. And I'm saving the 1960 classic Full Moon (Chaudhvin ka Chand), starring the legendary Guru Dutt, for the Castro screening on Saturday noon.
Supermen of Malegaon (India: Faiza Ahmad Khan, 2007)—In the textile town of Malegaon northeast of Mumbai, when the power looms screech to a halt and the moviegoers mass around the iron gates of the movie theater, the theater staff unlock the gates and leap out of the way as a tsunami of spectators flood in for the first Friday screening. In this movie-mad town you can get a Shahrukh Khan haircut for 101 rupees, while a Sanjay Dutt cut costs 151 rupees because there's "more hair at the back." The Muslim majority of the town makes the films in this "Mollywood" of video parlors, homemade sequels and movie parodies. Shaikh Nasir, owner of a clothing store that used to be a video parlor, recalls his no-budget local-dialect parody of Sholay that was a huge success in Malegaon. This breezy, hilarious film documents the pre-production and shooting phases of his latest work, a localized parody of Superman. Two guys under the green-screen sheet hold up the super-skinny, horizontal Shafique in his baggy Superman costume as he mimes flying through the air, fists shooting out before him. Like any Bollywood star, he's got a busy personal life: he drops a bomb on his director by letting his wedding rituals interfere with the shooting schedule. The small-pond diva complains that Malegaon's bad water cakes up her makeup and keeps the crew waiting as she chats on her cell phone. The camera falls into the river and has to be repaired in Indore.
At the end a few clips from the finished product Superman of Malegaon leave you wishing for more from this homegrown film industry. Slake your parody-thirst with the late-night screening of Quick Gun Murugun: Misadventures of an Indian Cowboy (India: Shashank Ghosh, 2009), which promises a bigger-budget, time-traveling Tamil take on the "sambar Western" that has been necessitating extra screenings at film festivals around the world.
Warrior Boyz (Canada: Baljit Sangra, 2008)—In trying to account for the distressing one hundred-plus death toll among young Punjabi/Sikh men due to gang violence in the Vancouver area, the filmmaker talks to three survivors—15-year-old Tanvir, 18-year-old Vicky and ex-con Jagdeep. In a few minutes we become surrogate parents of the most vulnerable Tanvir, kicked out of school and his family for holding firearms and drugs, seeking role models in all the wrong places, forced to carry a bat that his father thinks is for baseball. Subtitles make intelligible his mumbling, but not his strained rationalizations for earning respect among thugs who use him to sell drugs. The seen-it-all, politically aware Jagdeep provides the ethnic subtext of the violence: the need to stand up against the systemic racism and xenophobia aimed at South Asians, and the young men's out-of-context perverting of their own origins as Sikh soldier-saints obliged to fight in the service of humanity. Director Baljit Sangra is scheduled to attend the screening and, it's hoped, update us on better news about Tanvir's prospects for a decent life.
Iron Eaters (Bangladesh/Germany: Shaheen Dill-Riaz, 2008)—A decent life is the least of a laborer's challenges in this amazing documentary, shot in the Bangladeshi seaport of Chittagong, where the coastline provides an ideal location for the grounding of huge ships destined to be painstakingly taken apart by manual laborers. These workers are men, some young teenagers, forced out of their rice-farmer occupations up north to engage in a job that is potentially lethal in literally every step they take (without shoes): pulling heavy cables to shore in foot-deep mud among rusting steel plates, breaking up metal with primitive tools, and exposing oneself to fire, flying debris and falls from great heights—and perhaps worst of all, not being paid for it. While the spectacular long shots of behemoth vessels dwarfing the ant-like laborers inspire awe, the day-to-day negotiations of work leaders with middlemen and company owners simply to get paid provoke outrage on behalf of these likable yet desperate working men.
Searching For Sandeep (Australia: Poppy Stockell, 2007)—The boyish Poppy, a white lesbian in Sydney, decides to find a girlfriend online. In short order she's chatting with, and falling for, Sandeep, an Anglo-Indian woman who is sure she's a lesbian but has had no experience, never had an orgasm and hasn't come out to anyone—not even her four sisters and certainly not her conservative parents. (A holy man bewilders Sandeep's deep-in-denial mother by saying that her daughter is "with someone.") Still, Poppy reasons, there must be something between two women who both want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and love to eat saag paneer. Through the well-worn technique of closet (literal as well as figurative in Sandeep's case) video diaries, we ride along as the budding couple negotiate their first physical meeting on holiday in Thailand, the inevitable lonely return to their separate countries, and Poppy's risky decision to relocate to London to be closer to the woman she loves. In the meantime Sandeep's sisters peek at her text messages and confirm that she's gay. Anticipation, even dread, mount as the time comes for Poppy to meet Sandeep's reluctant parents, at which point we're thoroughly invested in the success of this romance. There's something deeply real about a mother who can't commit to visiting (and therefore acknowledging) the couple in their home, but who gives them plenty of mango pickle as a sour blessing.
Mad, Sad & Bad (UK: Avie Luthra, 2008)—I have to say this film was underwhelming despite my eager anticipation to see another Avie Luthra production. It's a "quirky" comedy about three Anglo-Indian siblings and their alcoholic drama queen of a mother, whose voiceover narration opens the film as she lies in her coffin ("definitely a low point"). We're sent back to a time before her death when her three grown children are struggling with problems in their relationships. Mum adores her elder son the psychiatrist despite his being a vicious, sex-addicted jerk. She disdains her younger son, a mediocre cable-TV "shitcom" writer who aspires to opera. And she torments her fortysomething single daughter, who yearns for a child without the necessary intermediate steps of moving out of the house and starting a relationship with a man. In the weeks before Mum's death the siblings experience rejection (even by a dating service), breakups, awkward meals, embarrassing interrogations and cheese epiphanies. I found the musical score too conspicuous and cheery, the characters too morose to warrant interest, and the storylines flat and straining for humor. In the role of the opportunistic wife of a rich undertaker, Ayesha Dharker, the eponymous heroine in Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist (1999), steals every scene she's in just by widening her eyes. I do like how Mum justifies throwing her daughter out of the house: "When I was your age I had a home of my own, three children and a husband who drank too much. You don't get that with spoonfeeding." But while that punchline instantly brings color to its character, other lines promise much and fail to deliver.
Children of the Pyre (India: Rajesh S. Jala, 2008)—Of the films I had a chance to sample, this one commanded the most fascination with its subject matter and manner of treatment. Winner of best documentary awards at Montreal and Sao Paulo 2008, Rajesh S. Jala's astonishingly beautiful film is set at the Manikarnika cremation ground in Varanasi, the oldest, busiest and most sacred cremation site in India. As many as 150 corpses are reduced to bones and ash here every day, in the Hindu belief that the departed soul achieves salvation, or moksha, as a result. The seven boys profiled in the film, ranging in age from 9 to 14, are of the Dom untouchable community whose full-time job—they don't attend school—is to stoke the fires, getting the bodies to burn as expeditiously as possible. Between pokes at the flaming logs, they snatch away the colorful burial shrouds to sell and pocket the proceeds. Despite their playful and callous demeanor, these kids are desperately trying to make a living in harrowing conditions: surrounded by charred corpses and accustomed to the stench and smoke of burning flesh and unending hours of 100-degree-plus temperatures. Unlike other kids, when they wake from a nightmare they're still surrounded by cadavers. The older workers yell at them and treat them no differently from the stray dogs that hang around the site. Some of their fathers are drunken abusers.
Don't let the disclaimer about "disturbing images" make you leave your seat or, God forbid, not show up at all. The burning bodies are insensate, and they're treated for the most part with respect. If you keep in mind that they're only shells being burned off for their souls to take flight, the horror abates. There are even moments of transcendence like those I've found in fictional films like The Harp of Burma and Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left For the East? The ethereally lovely song "Ud Jayega" that closes the film put me in a kind of tearful ecstasy that stayed with me for hours. But the horror that remains is the lives of these children, who endure with the help of thick skins, ganja, gutka (a chewing tobacco containing betelnut) and gallows humor. There happens to be a dance sequence near the end in which one of the boys shows surprising skill, but there's no Slumdog Millionaire-style happy ending in store for these kids.
Cross-published on Twitch. For more information and tickets, go to 3rd i's website.
How strange it must have been to be tasked with adapting Wes Anderson's eccentric and idiosyncratic live-action style to the animation required for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Mark Gustafson was the brave soul who took on that task when Henry Selick left the project to animate Coraline. During a Q&A session following the San Francisco International Animation Festival screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Animation Director Gustafson recalled how Anderson's unyielding dedication to his vision for the film made him very uncomfortable as a professional animator. Though out of his element, Anderson never allowed the once-accepted boundaries of stop-motion animation to compromise his vision. It's a good thing too, as it's Anderson's background in live-action film that most likely makes Fantastic Mr. Fox feel so different from other popular animated fare.
Based on the beloved book by Roald Dahl, Fox is the story of the titular Mr. Fox, a retired chicken thief who risks his happy home life for one last hit on the three meanest farmers in town: Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Spying on their farms from his tree-home, Fox concocts a secret scheme to help himself to their supply of chickens, ducks and cider. It's a breezy set-up and it initially feels like the story might have painted itself into a corner, but it's soon clear that Mr. Fox is less concerned with retaining a tight plot than with creating a rapid sense of forward progression. I'm unfamiliar with the source material, and the slapdash story might have been unavoidable, but it's a negligible concern when the editing and dialogue are as tight as they are in this film.
As a game of one-upmanship begins between Fox and the farmers, we start to see evidence of Anderson's non-traditional approach to animation. Characters often are jarringly replaced with different models—though recognizable, their sizes and shapes look noticeably different—and little imperfections in backgrounds and character design are perceptible throughout. Everything is very DIY and it's clear the filmmakers have chosen to focus on creating a sense of wonder and whimsy over polish and predictability. Instead of pulling the viewer out of the film, the concept of enhancing the gaudiness on screen only adds to its playfulness.
The voice-actors all are obviously in their element working with Anderson; many culled from previous films the director has made. George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Jason Schwartzman are ideal choices for the Fox family, and Dumbledore himself—Michael Gambon—makes for a devilish foil as the most cunning of the three farmers, Mr. Bean. Even with lock-on voice talent, the film is never overly reliant on them, and uses affecting facial close-ups, expressions and silences, which account for a lot of the film's humor.
Though he had little experience as an animator, Fantastic Mr. Fox is recognizable as a "Wes Anderson movie" through and through. I'm not so sure the zany approach used here would have fared as well in live-action—it's a lot more Life Aquatic wackiness than Tenenbaums introspection; but, it bears recalling that Life Aquatic's focus on humor over emotion marked that film as a critical failure. Mileage may vary, but I found Anderson's oddball take on a children's film a blast to watch. As an animated film it feels both daring and fresh.
