A man one day decides his life is boring and unsatisfying. He leaves his home and lurks the streets looking for someone. He eventually reaches to a prestigious garden where a man in a red suit awaits. He offers to our protagonist riches and happiness at the cost of his shadow. He accepts and gets his riches but how will others react to his lack of shadow? Discrimination, alienation? How much will he miss this one simple thing?
That's how the story starts in this short 10~ minute animated movie from a Swiss director Georges Schwizgebel and it is one of the better animated movies I saw this year (that wasn't made in this year). The plotline is seemingly stereotypical with all too known story where a man sells his soul (or shadow in this case) to the devil but it is not that quite generic. In fact it's rather interesting because it has another view on the whole situation. First of all this is just a shadow, it's not something you will not be able to enter heaven nor you will be forsaken in hell. It shows how much people discriminate and judge different people who lack something that "everyone has". But it also show how we take little things for granted every day until we lose them irreversibly. Unlike a lot of stories of this type where characters in the end repent for what they did, burn in hell or trick the devil this takes on a more interesting and more survivalist way to develop and end.
The overall look of the movie is completely amazing and exceptionally impressionistic. It looks like it was mostly done with oil and coal(?). Something like a moving painting on canvas. Since shadows are the main drive force for the story there's a lot of play on shapes and lights/shadows. Constantly the camera spins and changes angles so that it emphasizes on shapes and moving shades. One scene starts with a box with camera revolving around it and then it constructs itself into a bigger box, then into a building, then it multiplies and forms a city and so on. Fascinating and fairly original approach but sometimes way to energetic and disorienting. Perhaps that was intended?
In any case; not to be missed.
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that animation is indeed lovely. by the way, I still haven't been able to watch the whole thing of Country Doctor. I always manage to fall asleep within the first min or two of that animation... one of these days, I will watch the whole thing. maybe with the help of several cans of red bull energy drink?????
ReplyDeleteloved this, thankyou
ReplyDeletethanks man, i will check it out
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