Seoul Station

Seoul Destroying

Seoul Station
South Korea 2016
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

Where to start with Seoul Station. Well, technically it’s a prequel to the live action movie Train To Busan, by the same director, which I reviewed here. Although, I think he started working on this well before that movie, since this one was released only a month after that first film was released (to much success... which I suspect helped get the distribution deal pushed forward to let this one out of the gate). So I reckon that the correct point of view is probably that Train To Busan is actually a live action sequel to the animated movie Seoul Station but, whichever way you say it, since it’s set the day before the events in the other film, it makes it chronologically the first part of the trilogy which ended (to date), with Peninsula (another movie which I’ve not seen but thanks to the price of a fiver in Computer Exchange, I should be watching that one too fairly soon).

Now it’s been ages since I saw that first movie and I can’t remember much about it but, like most zombie movies, it gives no explanation of how the zombie virus actually got started. In this film, you see an infected homeless man pass away in the titular station and then start off the wave of zombies that are already unleashed during the events of that follow up (or whatever you want to call it) movie. 

However, don’t expect to find out what caused the zombie outbreak in the first place because, again like most tales in this genre, although you’re a little closer to ground zero in this movie... you still will be none the wiser as to any explanations for this plague. 

Now, the animation is nice enough and doesn’t look too cheap. Although, if my dad* is to be believed, it’s even worse than a 1970s Filmation cartoon in terms of animation... he bailed on it after a quarter of an hour. It’s... not as bad as 1970s Filmation but, it’s not Disney or Fleischer studios either. It just is what it is and in terms of the art of the ‘cartooning’ on this thing... I didn’t mind it.

But here’s the thing. It has more going for it than just the undead biting people up. It’s character driven... to the point where I thought the first half an hour was relentlessly slow and dull (it gets better) and it has a proper story which included a really neat twist near the end which, I honestly did not see coming. However, due to the way the characters are portrayed, not to mention the consequences of that surprise reveal, which I thought was visually going to be something much different to what it turned out to be... it’s also unrelentingly bleak. Much grimmer than the story portrayed in Train To Busan. Which is perhaps hard to believe given the unstoppable onslaught of people-munching going on throughout that particular movie but, trust me, though it’s not quite as gory as the live action counterpart... it’s vastly more cynical in its outlook. 

The film follows the exploits of a down-on-her-luck young lady who breaks off with her boyfriend, who is trying to pimp her out to pay their rent money. So they are split up and the outbreak leaves them unaware of each other’s locations. Meanwhile, the girl’s father catches up to the boyfriend and threatens him into helping him to find her. Then the zombie pandemic begins and the film cross cuts between the girl and the chaotic experiences she finds herself in... and the boyfriend and father trying to locate her. And it’s... not too terrifying, it has to be said but, like I said, it’s unrelentingly dark. Especially in terms of redeemable characters, for sure. 

My primary criticism of the movie... and this seems to be a more blatant trope of horror films lately, it seems to me... is the unrelenting stupidity of the main protagonists to not keep themselves out of trouble or improve their situation. If you are on the phone to your girlfriend, for example... and she’s just given you her location, you don’t wait on the phone for five minutes to hear how the carnage is playing out on her end of the line... you get in your car and you rescue her pronto, right? Well, apparently not, in the case of these characters, it seems. And, surely, if you are running through buildings, away from zombies who want to eat you... maybe shut a few doors behind you on your way? I mean, the actions of these characters do not endear me to the idea of ever standing beside them if I was ever in a zombie apocalypse. Their choices are just really stupid.

But, it’s an okay film and, that final twist, which makes room for even more bleakness, more than makes up for some of the film’s deficiencies. I mean, yeah, Train To Busan is by far the better, more watchable picture but, I dunno, Seoul Station is so unwavering in its cynical outlook (and has very strong language throughout) that I found the whole experience quite enticing for a while.

But, yeah, that’s me done on Seoul Station and, if you like Train To Busan then you will probably enjoy this one, to some extent. It has so much more going on for it than just being another zombie movie, I reckon. 

 * I wrote this review early last year, when he was still with us. 

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

Zeman By Proxy

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
aka Baron Prásil  
Czechoslovakia 1962
Directed by Karel Zeman
Second Run Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Many story spoilers.

Baron Prásil is the Czechoslovakian name for Baron Munchausen. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is the third of the six feature films by this wonderful director to utilise live actors pitched against various animation styles. It’s a film which was on TV a lot when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s but which seems to have dropped off the radar a bit over the last few decades. Like a lot of great films we were used to being exposed to back in the day, kids now, among them up and coming filmmakers of the future, just aren’t getting the opportunities to easily see the classics of cinema like they used to. For sure, there are still some modern classics shown but, honestly, TV stations are just not educating people with quality product like they should do in these dark times.

So, anyway, of the three Karel Zeman films I’ve watched since Christmas, this is probably my least favourite. That being said, it has all the usual Zeman charm in abundance and is certainly as inventive and entertaining a spectacle as his previous two features, for sure. This one is very similar, stylistically, to his previous cinema release, Invention For Destruction (aka The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne, reviewed here) and uses a lot of matte paintings and sets built which are based, somewhat, on Gustave Doré’s illustrations for one of the more popular 19th Century versions of the legends based on the real life Baron. The difference being that this one is shot in colour... although it’s not a colour film as is typically understood by that term these days. Rather, the live action scenes, starring actors such as Milos Kopecký (Munchausen), Rudolf Jelínek (Tony the moon man, who is actually not in any way such a thing) and Jana Brejchová (as Princess Bianca... although she was a bought woman sold to ‘The Sultan’ by pirates) and, indeed, the majority of the animations and drawings in the film, are obviously shot on monochrome stock and then tinted. The difference between the same process here than in most silent films where colour tinting was more common, being that sometimes a few colours are assigned to different sections of the screen simultaneously.

The film starts dramatically on Earth with shots of nature turning to aviation via butterflies, birds, various aeroplanes (including something like a jumbo jet) and then to rockets headed to the moon (the reality of which would not come to fruition for another seven years). Then, Tony the astronaut sees footprints on the moon. He follows them and finds the original rocket from Jules Verne’s From The Earth To The Moon and is then, astonishingly, greeted by the three central protagonists of that book who, like their companions, don’t need space helmets like Tony to be able to breath the atmosphere. Cyrano De Bergerac also greets them (he had some adventures on the moon in one of his literary incarnations, if memory serves... although my old English translation paperback of his lunar adventures is either up in the loft or donated to charity a couple of decades ago) and, lastly, Baron Munchausen adds his welcome.

The five of them obviously mistake Tony for a moon man and the good Baron decides to fly him back to Earth in his ‘star galleon’ (my term) flown by geese for Tony to see how Earth dwellers live. Of course, by the time they get to Earth the clock has flown back and the two have various of the Baron’s famous misadventures, picking up the ‘princess’ in the palace of The Sultan where, in a wonderful moment of satire, the Baron starts talking in comically abrupt woodwind sounds very similar to the sounds used by the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Tony remarks (in this translation, other versions referenced on the documentaries included are obviously taken from a much different subtitle translation) that the Baron’s conversational tones in this manner are... “Musical but hard to follow.” “The language of high diplomacy!” retorts the Baron and, yes, I couldn’t agree more.

And the adventure continues as the Baron and his two companions escape the sultan but, after using a smoke screen made up of Turkish tobacco, which everyone on the ship they are in puffs to summon up said smoke screen (even the ship’s figurehead has a puff), they end up in the belly of a giant fish and, later, during a battle scene, we also have a version of the famous cannon ball ride (there and back) so the Baron can gain the advantage of seeing what the enemy are up to. When Tony is slung into prison for stealing all the gunpowder for one of his scientific ‘fantasist’ inventions, the Baron lights the gunpowder which was hidden in a well in the castle for just such a purpose and the three of them are blown back to the moon.

It’s a nice flight of fancy from beginning to end and, along the way, you’ll see the usual Zeman inventiveness such as the Baron riding a sea horse which actually does have four legs with flippers for feet to swim with, accompanied by a swordfish on which the Baron hangs his clothes and dresses while riding said sea horse, a captivating but perhaps over used red smoke (the old coloured droplets in water trick) and even a battle being conducted like a piece of concert music.

Like I said, it’s not my favourite of his works but it’s still an excellent film and, like the other two Blu Rays in this series from Second Sight, there’s a hefty bunch of extras on the disc including a feature length documentary on the life and work of Zeman, which includes complimentary comments and interviews from some modern directors who have been influenced by Zeman’s works such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam (whose own, even more wonderful film of the Baron’s tales certainly stole a few things from this version, as well as others). These are found alongside a wonderful featurette by Michael Brooke of facts and figures about both the many and varied film and TV incarnations of the Baron’s adventures, plus his interesting insight into the musical score for this version. This featurette in particular was a real eye opener for me... I mean, we’ve all heard of the medical terms Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen By Proxy but stuff like Munchausen By Internet was new to me and, well, I loved the mathematical uniqueness of Munchausen Numbers for sure. Although, how you discover something like that last, where a specific four figure number is broken down into separate digits, each number multiplied by a factor of itself and then added to the previous to end up with the sum being the original number you started out with, is beyond me.

And there you have it. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is certainly a fabulous film with a fabulous director and with another fabulous batch of extras from Second Sight. And now I’ll have to track down some more of this director’s work at some point soon. And also some more Czech cinema. I’ve seen a couple of other interesting films from Czechoslovakia in the last couple of weeks (which will show up in review on this site at some point fairly soon) and I’m really enjoying what I’m seeing from the cinema of this country. I’ll get back to you on those.

Invention For Destruction

 

 

One Good Verne
Deserves Another

Invention For Destruction
aka Vynález zkázy
aka The Fabulous
World Of Jules Verne
Czechoslovakia 1958
Directed by Karel Zeman
Second Run Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Invention For Destruction is the second Karel Zeman film I’ve seen in a couple of weeks and, once again, I’m pretty impressed. This one sees the Czechoslovakian surrealist going more and more artificial with his world view and I can see how future directors such as Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson (bringing the Zissou) may well have been influenced by his style.

It’s based on For the Flag, a novel by Jules Verne (one of my favourite writers although, I have to say, I’ve not read this one) and while I was initially disappointed that the director had chosen to shoot this in black and white, I soon realised this is because the whole film is supposed to look like one of the original woodcut illustrations of that book come to life. So it was filmed in Zeman’s brilliant hodge-podge process which was energetically touted at the time as mysti-mation. Frankly, mysti-mation is about as useful and honest a movie making bit of hyperbole as terms like Tohoscope, Supermarionation or Dynamation but, that’s okay, I love silly terms like this and can’t get enough of them.

So basically, the film is a combination of stop motion animation, puppetry, flat cut out illustrations and live action on sets made to look like those illustrations. And I have to say, it’s so well done that I was completely taken in, at first, as to how the man managed to get the actors to move around the drawings without any matte lines or whatever showing. It was only after a minute or two, when I realised a shadow was being cast by an actor's arm on the drawings, that I realised that a lot of it was a built set with giant sized versions of the illustrated cut outs for the actors to move around in. Also, there are clever and cost effective combinations where some of the cutouts in, say, the foreground layers of the frames are obviously smaller drawings put in front of the sets and actors before the camera and, well, it somehow all looks like it’s the same scale, or certainly gives the illusion of it. It can’t have been easy to do to get all those crosshatched lines and details to match up as well as they do here. There’s some amazing sets with a wonderful homage, at one point, to a certain shot in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (no, not the shot you’re immediately thinking of when I say that) and the costumes worn by the actors and actresses are wonderfully flat and patterned and also completely blend in with the wonderful sets and illustrations (the sets and costumes were painted with the lines from specially made roller brushes).

I was totally bowled over by this small tale of a plot by a Nemo-like Count to kidnap a professor and bankroll the scientist’s new explosive energy force invention so he can use it for a super canon to threaten the world with. The actors are all superb in this, reacting quite naturally to their ‘beyond artifical’ environments and it includes, despite what I said in my earlier review of Zeman’s Journey To The Beginning Of Time (read that one here), that sense of the appreciation and wonder of certain parts of the environment by a couple of the adult characters, that was a more natural reaction for the kids in the previous film... but which manages to carry over a little into this one too.

Also, the score by Zdenek Liska works very well with the action of the thing... almost like it’s doing old style Hollywood Mickey Mousing with the cues but often responding to the camera movement within the environment, rather than necessarily trying to catch any action captured within the content of the frame. For instance, there’s a truly wonderful series of establishing shots by Zeman, at one point, of the camera zooming into an illustration of the building, then cutting and doing a similar zoom of the building from a different angle and... then again a third time and going through a window into the next scene. Each time the camera swoops towards the building, Liska catches those with musical flourishes of his own. It’s a nice moment.

It’s also a very inventive and the surrealistic ideas which are presumably added in, a lot of the time, by Zeman’s fertile imagination, are charming pieces of on-screen surrealism which make the film a pleasure to watch. For instance, there’s a scene where the head bad guy aims his flintlock and it misfires. That’s because it’s a clockwork flintlock and, as soon as he winds it up with the key on the handle, a steady stream of shells are projected from the weapon like it’s a miniature, hand held machine pistol. Yeah, lots of great ideas here such as strange, floating air tanks kitted out to be underwater bicycles (with little bells ‘a ringing’), an underwater sword fight between two divers and, worth the price of admission alone, a small group of roller-skating camels. I mean, wow, what more could you ask for.

There’s even a nice sequence when the hero’s oxygen tank is running out, as he’s trying to escape his captors underwater, where two fish swim together and both hit a vertical, invisible join and swim behind it so only the ends of their tails remain. Those two halves of juxtaposed tails have then formed a butterfly which flies away under the ocean... this flight of fancy used to underline that the character is hallucinating while running out of oxygen. Again, lovely stuff.

Not much more for me to say about Invention For Destruction except that I wish these movies were better known over here because they’re perfect to catch children with at a certain age. I was totally blown away again by this one and Second Run have included some nice extras on here including two of Zeman’s short films. I’m really looking forward to seeing his 1962 film, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen next and the review of that one should be appearing here in a couple of days time. Meanwhile, if you’re a fan of cinema and the way live action and animated work can be combined effectively on screen, definitely check this one out sometime.

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

 

The Beagle Has Landed

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
USA 1966
Directed by Bill Melendez
Watched on YouTube

I rarely watch anything on YouTube, it has to be said. I much prefer owning the stuff I watch rather than streaming or renting from a source which can just turn around and deny me the ability to watch what I want, when I want it any time it likes. However, I thought I’d make an exception this year because Varese Sarabande has just reminded me this gem of a cartoon exists by releasing the first CD issue of the soundtrack. Now, it has to be said, I did try and order a UK DVD or Blu Ray of It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, only to find that this thing seems to be totally out of print over here. Now normally in that situation I would just order the US edition but, alas, I knew that if I’d gone down that route then it was probable I wouldn’t even receive it until after Halloween this year... which kinda defeats the object. This is definitely a seasonal TV special and soundtrack and playing it past 31st October just seems like really bad luck, to me.

I remember that I never saw this one as a kid. Halloween, it has to be said, was not something that children in the UK in the 1970s or before... or even the 1980s for that matter... really participated in or knew much about. Trick or Treating was not a thing over here until maybe the mid to late 1990s and the way it’s mutated into some kind of aggressive tricksterism...as well as a totally cynical exercise in merchandising scary, seasonally appropriate merchandise to the kids and their financially challenged parents... is probably not something I should go on about at length here.

So yes, I was certainly aware of Halloween as a kid from only one source... The Observer magazine that got delivered to my parent’s door every Sunday. This used to run the Peanuts strip in colour near the back and, every October, you’d get the odd Halloween installment published. That was my only exposure to Halloween, not to mention The Great Pumpkin and so the bizarre culture shock I experienced when, in later years, I saw Halloween rise in popularity over here, spreading like a virulent celebration of destructive anarchy, made me wonder if our country had become just another state of the USA. I used to watch and love the odd Charlie Brown specials on TV as a kid (and later) as did everybody but I don’t know if this one even got shown on UK TV, truth be told. According to the IMDB it was only ever broadcast in the US and in Finland for some strange reason so... maybe it really never aired over here.

Anyway, I found myself with a spare half an hour for lunch and I found a few versions of this on YouTube. A couple were questionable in quality but I did quickly find an HD version and away I went.

It’s a little crude in style but most of those early Peanuts cartoons were and they were no worse for it. They’ve always been about the little pearls of wisdom that Charles M. Schulz used to inject into his strip and all of the ones I’ve seen (although I’ve seen nowhere near all of them) are primarily about promoting strong messages of right versus wrong. They are sometimes quite surreal (another reason to like them) and certainly very cynical at times but they always have a lot of heart in them and I suspect that’s why they’re so well loved around the world.

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown tells the short story of what happens when the Peanuts gang go trick or treating while Linus and Sally (who has a crush on Linus, if you recall), spend all night in the ‘most sincere’ Pumpkin Patch that Linus can find, fruitlessly awaiting the appearance of this peculiar figment of Linus’ imagination. There’s not much to write home about in this one, it has to be said but... it is a slice of pleasant, heart warming Charlie Brown goodness once again and, in terms of the animated specials, it also has a couple of firsts.

For example, this is the first time an animation had been done of Charlie Brown attempting to kick a football and landing on his back after Lucy pulls it away from him. Even in this first animated manifestation, though, it’s already being treated by the characters as a running joke.

The other famous first here is that this is the first time we get to see the animated Snoopy playing around as the World War One flying ace, in pursuit of the Red Baron. Most of the classic elements of those flights of canine fancy are in place here already such as, even when he’s doing a loop the loop, you never see anything other than the top of his dog kennel standing in for his Sopwith Camel and both the flying sequence and his progress returning home behind enemy lines is done with a deft touch which carefully rides the line between Snoopy’s imagination and what’s happening in the real world. The only thing which seems a little false here is that instead of Snoopy’s inner voice narrating his adventures... you never get to hear Snoopy’s thoughts in the cartoons... we instead have the surrogate voice of Charlie Brown narrating on the soundtrack. This almost but, doesn’t quite, work and it seems a bit false. I think this was something they dropped in later shows but I’d need to watch more of them to find out how quickly this element was ditched from the franchise.

The whole show is, of course, scored by the late, great Vince Guaraldi and this is always one of the best reasons to watch the early, classic Peanuts shows. This one has some nice variations on his famous Linus And Lucy theme going through it too which, frankly, I'm really looking forward to hearing when I can get around to giving the new CD a spin. It's good jazz scoring from a truly remarkable composer.

And that’s me more or less done with It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown which, frankly, any fan of the Peanuts gang will surely love. I say more or less because there’s a little epilogue to my review here. When the end credits were rolling I noticed that the cartoon was released in 1966, which rang a little alarm bell in my head. I remembered that a couple of years ago I bought a DVD called The Peanuts 1960s Collection, which is also now sadly out of print and which I haven't had a chance to watch yet. When I looked at the box when I got home I realised that It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was on this all along. So I really needn’t have spent so much time and energy trying to get hold of this one and neither did I need to resort to YouTube to watch it. Sometimes the things you want are right on the end of your nose so, the moral to take away from this story, I think, is this. Whatever you do, don’t get as old as me... it’s no fun.

Incredibles 2

Fantastic Five

Incredibles 2
USA Directed by Brad Bird
UK cinema release print.

Okay, this one’s kinda fun.

Despite dropping the definite article preceding the rest of the title, Incredibles 2 is still a sequel, 14 years later, to The Incredibles. I guess they’re thinking that if they want to ignore this sequel later down the line they can slap it back on and call that one The Incredibles 2 maybe?

Now there was no way in my mind that this follow up was ever going to be as good as The Incredibles because, frankly, that movie was one of the top ten greatest animated feature films of all time, as far as I’m concerned. However, I have to say director Brad Bird has done a good job on this one and it’s still a pretty great movie. It’s also not, quite, just a repeat of the first film although, honestly, there are some structural similarities and the ‘not such a surprise’ villain is a similar kind of reveal, in some ways, to the plot twist of the first movie (which I think was handled a little better).

This one concentrates on Elastigirl, voiced once again by Holly Hunter, as she embarks on a superhero campaign, marketing to bring ‘supers’ back into the limelight and stop them from being illegal anymore. Meanwhile, Mr. incredible, voiced once more by Craig T. Nelson, is left at home holding the baby and being a house husband trying to keep things going by solving a problem with Violet’s love life and Dash’s mathematics homework while trying to cope with baby Jack Jack’s growing list of super powers. And, like the first one, it all seems to work really well.

Now, the director does take things into slightly different waters where the first movie didn’t go, in one scene where he has anthropomorphised an animal... which does seem to mark new territory here in that, like in the first of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the 1940s, it seems a little out of place in a film which is primarily a version of the world we live in (albeit one where super powered humans actually exist). However, I have to say that the sequence in question, where Jack Jack goes toe to toe in a ferocious fight with a racoon, is a pretty cute scene and it’s not too intrusive within the chemical mix of the rest of the movie, in that it in any way dominates the style of the remainder of the story. It’s just a fun scene which you can let go of as soon as it’s over without, necessarily, thinking about the way the ecosystem of the ‘Incredibles Universe’ works in these films.

As with the first film, it’s all very nice to look at with rich colours, neat editing and it all moves along at a breakneck pace. Everything, again like the first film, is held in place and glued in all the right places (pretty much wall to wall, in this case) by Michael Giacchino’s incredible score. Now, it has to be said that while the soundscape he used for the first movie is back here, as it should be, the film is not quite as derivative of the style of the first film’s rejected composer John Barry. For instance, you can hear the temp track of films like Goldfinger and Thunderball screaming through in the music from the first film to such an extent that you can literally just drop tracks from the Bond films into The Incredibles and they would be timed to hit exactly the same dramatic points. That being said, there’s one cue in the new film where Elastigirl is on the way to her first day on the new job which sounds like a glorious mash up of John Barry’s Into Miami from Goldfinger and Jerry Goldsmith’s Your Zowie Face from In Like Flint so... you know... some of this homage is still present in a few places. It’s maybe not quite as fun as his first score but it’s still pretty great and works well, again, as a stand alone listen.

I think there were maybe a few missed opportunities in terms of cameos of characters from The Incredibles that might have made it into the second but because it’s trying to do, to some extent, it’s own thing in terms of story (although there are some marked similarities, too), I can’t really blame the writer/director for having a few characters sit this one out. That being said, he still has deliberate echoes of the first film finding their way into this so the fans and admirers of the original don’t feel too disappointed. So... we have a scene with Edna Mode, voiced once again by the director, getting to grips with baby Jack Jack’s new powers and we have a plot set up involved around a superhero coming out of retirement and facing possible betrayal at some point in the story. The point is, though, that despite having this kind of thing built into it, it never really feels like you're retreading old ground and Bird seems to really hold everything together in order to give us a new adventure from the heroes we’ve come to love.

And that’s me done on this one. Incredibles 2 lives up to the superlative of its title and gives people who loved the first one something else to give their affection to. If you’re already on board with these characters then you should have a great time with this one. If you’ve not seen the original, however, you might want to go back and watch that one first as this one starts off literally with a flashback scene which picks up, to the second, where the last one finished. Whichever film you watch first though... have a good time.

Isle Of Dogs

I Love Dogs

Isle Of Dogs
2018 USA/Germany
Directed by Wes Anderson
UK cinema release print.

So it’s only April and here we have what may well turn out to be the absolutely best film of the year. Isle Of Dogs is yet another corker from one of the two greatest, living American directors Wes Anderson (the other being Hal Hartley, of course). Now, though I’ve seen almost all of Wes Anderson’s movies, I’d not seen his earlier stop-motion movie Fantastic Mr. Fox (I don’t remember being that impressed with the original Roald Dahl source material as a kid) but I’m now quite keen to see this as I realised, while watching this, that the medium in which Anderson has chosen to work with on this thing in no way compromises or marginalises his artistic signature.

To the contrary, despite the fact that none of this film is live action, it looks and feels unmistakably like a Wes Anderson movie right from the get go. All the usual markers are there including the labelling, the setting out of parameters and the linear, clean shots that mark his work out with a unique fingerprint. In fact, as I was watching the film, I started to wonder if the reason that absolutely no compromise in this director’s style is in evidence here was in fact because his regular, live actions films themselves, in some way, resemble neatly organised, animated works. It’s something I’ll need to ponder on further.

Isle Of Dogs starts with a metaphorical fable (in terms of its relation to the main body of the story) of a boy samurai and his defeat of an enemy that wanted to rid Japan of all dogs. The story then flashes forward to the main setting of the film... a Japan of the future in which the mayor has ordered all dogs, which have pretty much contracted a contagious dog flu, to be dumped on a trash island. It is here that the main human protagonist’s dog ‘Spots’ has been dumped first (also known as Dog Zero) and it’s here that Akira, the boy pilot, flies to rescue him. The film shows how, when he teams up with a pack of ferocious dogs, he goes to find Spots and right the wrongs of the mayor, who is about to poison the entire island and wipe out all the canines.

And it’s great. Just great.

The dogs all speak English and are voiced by various film stars, many of them Wes Anderson regulars. So people like Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Liev Shreiber, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, Greta Gehrig, Frances McDormand, Scarlet Johansson and, seriously, Yoko Ono. Meanwhile, various Japanese human characters, played by a variety of actors and actresses, only talk in their own language and it’s completely raw in the film except where it’s deliberately translated by various people or by electronic gubbins (as pointed out to the audience in the typical Anderson way). So, in some ways, the Japanese humans have the same kind of effect on proceedings as the nonsensical, abstract ‘waaah, waaah, waah’ voices of the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Well... unless you happen to speak Japanese, I guess.

The film breezes along and it has all the usual, inventive, witty and sometimes quite moving dialogue moments you'd expect from Anderson, as Atari and an angry stray dog called Chief form an unlikely bond in an attempt to find Spots. The animation is just perfect and some of the expressions the dogs make to the audience where they break the fourth wall like Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy might do in one of their shorts when they look to the audience for some kind of understanding or validation is great. It’s also got its own visual short-hand going on too, as any filmed footage shown on a TV or screen of the characters is done as a traditional line drawing style cartoon whereas the body of the work is done in a stop-motion style animation. So that was a nice touch.

The music is great too... as you would expect when the great Alexandre Desplat is working with this director. I believe this is their third collaboration and, like the previous two - Moonrise Kingdom (reviewed here) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (reviewed here) it’s absolutely brilliant and quite possibly this will also be the best score of the year too.

Like pretty much all of Anderson’s films, there’s usually a substantial amount of needle-dropped music in his work and although this has kind of calmed down a little since he started working with Desplat, there are still a few places her and there where he goes the needle dropped route in this. One of his listed influences on this film is my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa and there are a few pieces from Kurosawa scores in the movie. The one which made me jump off my seat was in a scene where the theme from Seven Samurai starts playing... a tune which is never far from my mind anyway. There’s also, amongst the odd, assorted songs, a nice and extremely unusual ‘cover version’ of Prokofiev’s Troika thrown into the mix... so, yeah, you can bet I’ll be ordering this CD as soon as I stop typing up this review.

And there’s probably not too much more I can say about this convoluted yet ultimately simply rendered and inventive film. The problem when someone makes such a perfect movie is that there’s not always as much you could say about it as there are no flaws to pick up on. Isle Of Dogs is easily one of the best animated movies I’ve seen for quite some time but it’s also, quite unmistakably, an ‘on brand’ Wes Anderson film and this director just seems to be getting consistently better with every piece of motion picture art he makes. I can’t recommend this film enough to anyone who will listen and, honestly, you’d be really missing out if you don’t see this one at cinemas. Such a great ride.

Anomalisa

New Lisa Life

Anomalisa
2015 USA
Directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman
UK cinema release print.

Welcome to my very short review of Anomalisa, a film that I went into totally unprepared for... which is usually a good thing. I’d seen someone recommend it on Twitter and I liked two other films written by Charlie Kaufman... Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. All I knew about the film itself, however, is that it was not a children’s film and that it employed stop-motion animation in the pursuit of the story, as opposed to live action filming.

As it started, I realised my experience wouldn’t be a totally negative one, at any rate, because there is a line or two of dialogue referencing Darren McGavin as Kolchak - The Night Stalker... so I was pretty happy about that. Another thing that I was happy with, after about a quarter of an hour, was the dawning realisation that the main lead was being voiced by one of my favourite and much under-rated actors, David Thewlis. So this was all good. What I didn’t pick up on until I waited for the cast list at the end, however, was that the Lisa of the title, Anomalisa, was being voiced by one of my favourite actresses too... Jennifer Jason-Leigh... so this was all good.

Another point of note is that there are a large number of characters, many of them quite minor, appearing in the film but the entire voice cast of the movie is only three people in total. Of those three, Thewlis and Jason-Leigh only play one character each... which means all the rest of the characters in the movie, male and female, are voiced by another underrated actor, the original Francis Dollarhyde himself, Tom Noonan. So a curio of a movie and I would expect nothing less than that from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, to be honest.

However, that being said, I can’t say I was totally enthralled by the movie I saw, either.

The problem with the film for me comes not from the basic idea or the voice acting (the three are amazing, as you’d expect) and even, the ‘acting’ of the stop motion models is pretty convincing... you might even find yourself forgetting you are watching puppets at some points. The main problem for me was just that it was a little dull in places. It wasn’t because the story is quite down beat and depressing, dealing as it does with Michael (David Thewlis) who is staying in a hotel for a night before addressing an audience about the keys of customer service... I can handle downbeat just fine and often prefer that kind of movie over anything which feels false. It just didn’t really go into a totally unexpected realm until one nightmarish sequence when one of the characters turned out to be dreaming. I thought it was going to go full tilt into paranoia and fantasy at this point but... nope, it just came right back into the hum drum reality of the characters again, as Michael spends his evening having a kind of meltdown, one of the symptoms of which is his one night stand with the title character.

All that being said, however, despite my ambivalent attitude towards the on-screen shenanigans of the animated characters, I didn’t exactly hate it either and I was surprised to find the end of the movie had gone so quickly... the hour and a half of the screen time felt like a little over 40 minutes to me... so I must have been getting something out of it. Perhaps it’s my ability to easily put myself in the shoes of the central character which made the film a bit less lustrous in terms of plot or story content (not that I’m the biggest fan of story, either).

There is, obviously, much to recommend and admire in the film, though...

I’ve already mentioned the incredible voice talent but Kaufman’s regular composer of choice, Carter Burwell, provides an appropriate if, not entirely, memorable score... at least in the context of its mix in the movie itself. It's the craftsmanship of the models, however, which really stands out in this movie and, more importantly, the way their movements and mannerisms have been observed. Little throw away moments that people seem to exhibit in their day to day existence seem to be captured in the way the models move and react to both each other and their immediate environment. There’s a sex scene which, I’m reliably informed, was the longest thing to film and get right. It certainly shows it was laboured over because it’s a nicely observed sequence where humanity at both its best and worst comes together as two people try and capture their own personal lightning. It’s a nice moment in a film full of ‘moments’ but, ultimately, it brings no real peace to the main protagonist, Michael, and the next morning Tom Noonan’s voice is pitched against Jennifer Jason-Leighs saying the same lines simultaneously. This is a clear indication, as we are obviously experiencing things from Michael’s perceptions, that Lisa is maybe less standout and special in Michael’s world than he (or she) at first thought... which is a shame and one of many downbeats in the film which races towards an ending of... well not much closure. The only sequence in the movie where a kind of 'anti-closure' is given is the final scene of the film, which is the only scene in the movie not to feature Michael, as it happens.

Ultimately, I’m glad, as an observer of cinema, that I got the chance to see Anomalisa. It’s probably not going to set the world alight, I suspect, but it is interesting and shows us a juxtaposition of technique and content that, while not exactly new, is at least unusual and rarely glimpsed. Not something I would rush out to see again but fans of cinema might do well to at least take a little look at this exploration of humanity and, frankly, I want to see (and hear), David Thewlis in more lead roles. America seems to have really wasted his talent, in some ways.

Walerian Borowczyk Short Films And Animation

Living On Borowczyk Time

Walerian Borowczyk Short Films And Animation
France - various years
Directed by Walerian Borowczyk 
Arrow Dual Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

I’ve not seen a heck of a lot of films, over the years, by the famous and, quite possibly notorious, director Walerian Borowczyk because a lot of the material he turns his attention to is kind of edgy and it’s usually handled in the kind of matter-of-fact but playful way that drives British film censors wild and reaching for their loathsome, art defacing scissors. That being said, he was always on my mind when I was going through College in the late 1980s/early 1990s because his films often seemed to be playing at the equally famous Scala cinema... and I usually had one of their incredible “picture timetable” posters pinned above the desk while I worked, more often than not featuring shots of scantily clad ladies as illustrations for films by this director (and usually a few Russ Meyer ladies would be on there somewhere too).

I remember, when I was studying my Graphic Design Degree at the London College Of Printing, my old screen printing teacher, with whom I used to occasionally play badminton, telling me that she was off to a screening of Borowczyk shorts at the Scala one evening. I’m guessing the contents of this dual DVD/Blu Ray edition, which has been put out by Arrow films and which I got cheap... err... at a value for money price at Fopp is, probably, fairly near to what she saw that evening.

I’d have to say that this disc is really not what I was expecting from this Polish born director who worked in France and has a reputation of making erotic, probably pornographic to a large extent, movies of a certain level of acceptability for cineastes in this country. The vast majority of the content on here comprises animations with, I think, just a couple of live action films and I found it surprising that there was practically no erotic content of the kind you might expect to see from a man of Borowczyk’s particular interests and obsessions. That being said, having seen another of his feature length films since watching this collection, I can see that there is a little bit of correlation between the techniques used here and those deployed on his more famous works. I’ll hopefully get to say just a little more on that sense of continuity when I come to write a review of his Immoral Tales... coming soon to this blog!

All in all, the style of a lot of the films on this disc are something that I might expect to have come from the mind of modern surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer and both he and Borowczyk seem to share a passion for exploring what I am about to call... a cinema of textures. Investigating, through animation in this case, the way both animate and inanimate objects can be exploited as a celebration of flat surfaces and their juxtaposition with contrasting shades, colours and textures. And also, another similarity to Svankmajer’s work, things will often move around by themselves with no visible hand at work to explain the motivation and spirit of various paraphernalia.

The films show off a wealth of both visual and aural ideas as you go through the body of work, perhaps more obvious and less tempered than when they are restricted by the credibility expected from an audience when using live actors... especially made, as most of Borowczyk’s films were, in an era bereft of the CGI trickery modern audiences take for granted. There are around eleven shorts on here and one feature length animation, The Theatre Of Mr And Mrs Kabal, which is a sequel of sorts to an earlier short found on this disc, The Concert. 

Out of these, there are certain films which struck a chord with me more than others and I found myself admiring the minutia of an inner Borowczyk world unfiltered by the constraints which might leave his live action work bereft of the majority of such overt observations. I liked the way, for instance, his short film Les Astronautes is mostly animated by rapidly cutting stills together... well, yeah, that’s all film, actually, but what I mean to say is... doing it so that the eye can easily perceive the cuts. Like a lot of his shorts, the film pulls us straight into a world of abstraction but in this case, it does have at least a basic, easier to conceive, linear framework to hang things on to... the journey of an astronaut in his spaceship. It’s a cornucopia of absurdities which possibly wears a little thin by the time it’s played out but there are nice little touches like a periscope the main protagonist uses when he’s flying around the earth which shows his eyes visible in the top part as he watches a lady in her underwear from inside his perpetually morphing spacecraft. There’s another nice little touch when he is flying along upside down in space and his hat drops to the ceiling of his craft. Every time he reaches up/down and puts it on so he can be wearing it whilst driving, it just drops to the bottom/top of the ship again... so instead he sits on some books to make himself tall enough to wear it. It is somewhat whimsical and I might be tempted to say that the whole thing was influenced by The Beatles movie Yellow Submarine... except that it dates from 1959, long before that particular animated feature and long before space travel was a reality too, of course. So maybe the creators of Yellow Submarine saw this at some point.... it’s quite possible I would imagine.

His short work Renaissance features, more overtly, another device which I’ve also often seen Jan Svankmajer use, that of the self constructing or deconstructing ‘entity’... be that entity an animate or inanimate object or character. This one starts off, for instance, with an owl constructing itself from its basic components, the feathers growing thicker as time passes. After he’s done with the owl, Borowczyk focuses on various other objects in a room constructing themselves... trumpet, photograph, wicker basket, scary children’s doll etc. A bunch of grapes appear to the sound of a typewriter clunking away with added carriage return (not sure if any of my younger readers will be familiar with the expression ‘carriage return’ actually... which is a sobering thought about the rapidity of technological change in the scary world we’re living in these days, I think). The short ends with a hand grenade being constructed and then, quite rapidly, deconstructing the whole room again when it blows up.

Another of the many shorts on here which I took a shine to was Joachim’s Dictionary, which consists of a line drawing of a man with slightly different things happening to him as a new dictionary definition is applied to each mini vignette. There was a nice little two part joke which highlighted, in different definitions, the difference between Man and Boy by showing how each would eat a cherry and then just spit out the stone... that is to say, man and boy: no difference between the two. So that was cool although, the majority of the shorts aside from these three and another interesting one called Scherzo Infernale, detailing briefly the story of an angel who wants to be a prostitute, really didn’t do much for me. I had, very much, a feeling of ‘seen it all before’.

The feature length animation The Theatre of Mr and Mrs. Kabal, a sequel to the less interesting short The Concert (aka Le concert de M. et Mme. Kabal) held my interest a little better. The film starts off with the animator, possibly Borowczyk, entering the frames and conversing with Mrs. Kabal, who communicates with him in an electronic gibberish on the soundtrack which is subtitled in three different languages as she speaks. This one explores another surrealist environment and also hangs a somewhat linear, if hard to fathom, thread through the whole thing. Mrs. Kabal seems, I think, to have an aversion to butterflies but, when she ‘consumes’ too many, her husband has to find a way to help. Inspired by ‘a film within a film’ about the human body at his local cinema, he blows his wife up in size and goes to work on her, entering her insides in a manner similar to the protagonists in the movie Fantastic Voyage, but with the size difference achieved through reverse means. Turns out the butterflies have caused quite a lot of trouble in Mrs. Kabal’s body and it was interesting to see what I can only presume was the ghost of Mrs. Kabul, herself, wandering around inside her for a bit, too.

A well animated feature but, as I said, one out of many which held my attention much less than I was expecting. That being said, it is a very creative set of shorts in many ways and, if youre not too long in the tooth and were not inundated by completely incomprehensible Polish and Czechoslovakian surrealist cartoons playing as fillers between TV programmes in the early 1970s, then you may find that you’ve not seen stuff like this before. At the small amount of money I payed for this dual DVD/Blu Ray edition at Fopp, it’s definitely something I would advise any cinephiles to avail themselves of in the near future. As for me, I think I prefer Borowczyk’s live action features, what little I’ve seen of them, to his animated shorts but, even so, I can appreciate the hand of a genuine artist when I see one. Certainly, I’m glad I’ve seen these now and it’s not inconceivable that I’ll give them another watch in years to come. Put this one on your list if you are a fan of shorter works of cinematic art, is my advice.