The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Three Films Make A Post: Turn the darkness into light

The Secret of Kells (2009): I dare say there’s not exactly a load of animation out there that is highly influenced by the art of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. It doesn’t fit too many narratives, I assume. Yet where would this be more appropriate than in a tale about a mediaeval illuminated manuscript?

Directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey made some interesting choices in other regards, as well, often slipping into the – to the modern eye strange – mindsets of their protagonists, while appearing to make a film that’s philosophically at once pagan, Christian and modern humanist. Which most of the time makes for a narrative full of surprising details, even when it hits a lot of the tired old Hero’s Journey beats. It’s also so damn beautiful I probably wouldn’t even criticize it (much), if it were only the Hero’s Journey stuff.

The Flowers of Evil aka Aku no hana (2019): This adaptation of a much loved manga and anime feels nothing at all like what you’d expect from a Noboru Iguchi film. If that’s a good thing or a bad one depends on one’s tolerance for melodramatic, pseudo-intellectual teenage bullshit with a wee bit of sexual deviance included taking the place of absurdist gore as an expression of all possible human feelings.

Mine isn’t terribly high, so I very quickly lost patience with these particular characters, their small town malaise and their inability to read Baudelaire without drenching their books in dramatic rainfalls; your disgust with misuse of books may vary.

Nightmare aka Nattmara (1965): Apparently, not only Jimmy Sangster over in the UK found himself thinking about what to do with the Hitchcock model of what we’d now call the domestic thriller. Arne Mattsson over in Sweden certainly thought along the same lines as Sangster with this tale of gaslighting. The resulting film is at times beautiful and moody, painfully obvious, crude and elegant, with a curious idea of how to time plot revelations running into moments of deep intensity.

Thus, the whole thing feels rather disjointed, though it is never without something interesting happening on screen.

Three Films Make A Post: Even if I kill you, I won't forget.

Werewolves (2024): This werewolf plague movie by Steven C. Miller is absolutely a SyFy original movie script of the style before these films discovered “irony” someone threw a bit of money at. As such, it is pretty dumb, doesn’t think about any of the actual implications – the mind-breaking horror and utter trauma - of its set-up that would make for a more interesting movie, and instead turns into a Frank Grillo and company versus werewolves shoot ‘em up with occasional cool gore effects.

Which I’d be fine with if Miller’s direction were a bit more inspired, or a bit more dynamic, or a bit grittier instead of being workmanlike and okay, and so full of lens flare some scenes genuinely look as if someone had farted light at the screen.

Flow aka Straume (2024): If it were nothing else, this is a brilliant example how much individuality and personality can fit into unashamedly digital animation – these things really don’t all need to look like Pixar. Of course, there’s quite a bit more to Gints Zilbalodis’s tale of a cat and her increasingly large group of animal friends roaming what looks a lot like the more pleasant part of a post-climate apocalypse world. There’s no dialogue here, but a lot of expressive animal noises (watching this at home with a cat would prove interesting, I believe), and animation so emotionally expressive, I certainly wasn’t missing dialogue or voice overs.

There’s a sense of wonder as well as one of melancholia running through the film, and where its plot is at its core simple and very generic, its artistic impression is singular and individual, leaving an immense emotional impact.

Heavier Trip aka Hevimpi reissu (2024): Where the first Heavy Trip was a delightful example of a comedy about misguided but loveable enthusiasts, its sequel by original directors and writers Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren is rather less successful.

Too much of the film consists of re-treads of rock music comedy standards that hit only about half of the time; everything here feels more generic than it did in the first film, less heartfelt and more professionally competent.

Which doesn’t turn this into a terrible film, just one I don’t see myself returning to very often, or at all.

Gandahar (1987)

Paradisiacal Gandahar – apparently a state of mind nearly as much as it is a city state – is threatened by a mysterious, evil force that turns the people of the outlying parts of the place to stone via inexplicable rays. The sort-of-government of Gandahar send their best man for this sort of thing, the not completely enthusiastic Syl (voiced by Pierre-Marie Escourrou) to find out what is going on.

Syl soon stumbles into love with the beautiful and typically naked Airelle (Catherine Chevallier), and finds out about some of the darker secrets of his beloved home in form of definitely not beautiful but glorious mutants exiled from it. Rather quickly he understands the threat to be an army of robots and the giant brain – the product of a too successful Gandaharian experiment - that controls them. These are the less strange bits of our hero’s adventures, however.

This third and final of French filmmaker René Laloux’s gloriously weird pieces of full-length science fiction animation is an appropriately mind-blowing tale of weird science, weird time travel, weird romance, and the kind of (weird) visual imagination the French seem culturally predisposed to lavish on their science fiction be it in graphic novels, animation or film. French cinema in this mode is in the business of turning dreams, symbols and most probably drug visions into moving pictures of the most peculiar kind, and Laloux and his various collaborators do this in ways profoundly beautiful and strange - in all of his films.

In this, Gandahar is absolutely of a piece with the director’s other works here. As it is in a philosophical slant that seems fascinated with the concept of communities, or rather, focussed on imagining how collectivism and individualism can be reconciled without fascism rearing its ugly head. Gandahar certainly is anti-fascist, among other, much less clear things, as much as it is dream-like, strange, and peculiarly individual. There’s a mix of sharp intelligence and naivety to Laloux’s writing, and really, his world view, that counteracts the elements in it that could be too hippiesque for some tastes.

The film’s visual design is strange, and often utterly astonishing in its matter of fact treatment of strangeness and otherness that asks its audience to accept all the strange bits and pieces it comes up with before trying, and probably more than just occasionally failing, to understand them.

Of course, Gandahar’s visuals do have to put most of their weight on the design, for the actual animation of these designs in it is pretty terrible. The North Korean studio it was farmed out to did a terrible job with it, animating so lazily and inefficiently, you’ll imagine amateurs at work instead of the professional animators these people actually were.

The thing is, Laloux’s vision is so strong, this hardly matters for the film as a whole, or rather, it’s a mild annoyance in comparison to the rest of Gandahar’s strange, dreamlike beauty. To some viewers, it might even enhance it.

The Spine of Night (2021)

Having ascended a mythical mountain, the – always very naked – swamp witch Tzod (Lucy Lawless) converses with an armoured figure (Richard E. Grant), the guardian of the last bloom of a blue flower growing there. Tzord tells of the rather disturbing developments in the human world below during the last centuries, leading to flashbacks that start with her own kidnapping and eventual death and will lead into the rise of a near-godlike conqueror.

For its first fifteen minutes or so, Phil Gelatt’s and Morgan Galen King’s The Spine of Night appears to a be nothing more than a highly competent homage to the poster children of rotoscope animation, Fire & Ice and Heavy Metal. I’ve never been a true connoisseur of that animation style, though I do like these two core texts more than just a little. Frazetta and Sword and Sorcery, or the French school of comics art not beholden to the ligne claire are things irresistible, independent of the form they are presented in, after all.

So, I’d probably have been quite happy with it, if Spine had only been the violent and nudity-positive bit of animated sword and sorcery its beginning promises. It doesn’t take long, however, until it becomes clear these filmmakers have deeper and more complex interests than making a film in the style of things they clearly love and admire. Instead of the more typical heroic/anti-heroic tale that seems to be set up, the film soon broadens its scope to become a much more epic tale, spanning centuries, with characters that would be the heroes and villains of most other movies of this kind coming into and out of the plot as parts of the grand tapestry the film is weaving. Most of them have pasts and futures the film only hints at, suggesting a world full of interesting, mysterious and large lives in ways I find deeply satisfying. Worldbuilding by suggestion, by leaving out explanations to get the imagination of an audience going has gotten rather out of style these days, but when treated as carefully and thoughtfully is it is here, it does fire up at least this viewer’s imagination as little else does.

The Spine does take this approach not only to characters but the world it takes place in as well – the gorgeous and fantastic character and background design is highly suggestive, and manages to make rule of cool elements feel like more than just that – true parts of its world that don’t need to be explained.

On a plot level, this takes elements of sword and sorcery and the cosmicism/cosmic horror that has been an important part of this style of fantasy since its beginning and turns it towards the mythic. In a film that also features a creation myth in which classic rotoscope takes on the shadowy qualities of shadow puppet animation, this is rather obviously a conscious decision, a – successful – attempt at taking the outlook of the pulpier arm of the classic weird tale and emphasising its philosophical contents without having to lose the blood and the guts (there’s a lot of that on screen here as well), or the beauty and terror of existing in a cosmos that cares not one whit about you.

Philosophically, this is a film about the question of how to live with this idea of an at best uncaring cosmos, a place where human strife and achievement is essentially pointless, and where even gods are of no actual import in the greater scheme of things - of how to look into the void and not become it. Thinking about this does involve exploding a god-like wizard after he has been fought by armoured skeletons, so there’s a wonderful mix of completely unexpected thoughtfulness with the stuff the film sells itself on – no cheating the audience off what it came to see (or hear – the dialogue is perfect for what the film tries to do, as well) around here.

None of what I’ve just written, alas, quite captures how The Spine of Night actually made me feel watching it, the elation I got from watching a movie that’s sword and sorcery as imagined by Frank Frazetta covers, a fantasy tale that is as mythic as it gory, as much a part of the landscape of horror as it is of fantasy, and a wonderful bit of cosmicism with generously added trippyness. But that’s how it goes, sometimes.

Titan A.E. (2000)

For reasons that are never really becoming all that clear or important to the movie, the alien Dredge destroy Earth. The surviving humans become the galaxy’s black people; there will be no actual black people in the movie.

During the flight from Earth, Cale’s (Matt Damon) father left him for some humanity-saving business that apparently didn’t work out too well. Now, fifteen years later, Cale is part of the galactic underclass, doing a crap scavenging job while talking big. He’s a bit of a prick, really, but it turns out a genetically encoded ring his father gave him contains a map leading to the Titan, a spaceship Cale Senior developed that could save the dredges of humanity, somehow, so he is a prick with something useful to offer.

Corso (Bill Pullman), a former associate of his father, drags Cale into the hunt for the Titan; also interested are the Dredge, who haven’t grown any fonder of humanity in the intervening years and want to destroy the Titan and kill Cale. So off into space Cale goes with Corso and his band of misfits. He’s going to fall in love, learn valuable lessons and grow into the hero his father would be proud of.

Because despite this thing having five people listed with story and screenwriting credits – among them genuinely talented ones like Ben Edlund and Joss Whedon – Titan A.E.’s script is about as well-developed as any one-writer first draft screenplay. It’s full of elements that stay completely unexplored, pointless digressions, and a gaping hole where Cale’s actual character development is supposed to be.

There’s certainly a lot going on in the film, but it lacks the energy a good one damn thing after another narrative needs.

The film has a lot of action set pieces, no question, and they are typically decently realized, but they never feel like anything but set pieces inserted into certain places in the plot because that’s where a set piece belongs.

On the animation side, this final direction credit for the great Don Bluth – co-directing with Gary Goldman – is an attempt at marrying digital and hand-drawn animation styles. As is typical of this era, in practice this means that two completely different art styles repeatedly bash into one another, like halves of two different movies colliding, badly. You can often see what the filmmakers were trying to do, but the execution is distractingly awkward. In general, while there are some fine designs on screen, the animation is choppy and a bit disjointed. lacking the flow it needed to make those action set pieces sing.

In short: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

These turtles, be they heroes or ninjas, popping up in comics or animation form, have never been much of a part of my pop cultural universe, but I’d have to be pretty dead inside not to love this piece of absolutely brilliant animation by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears.

It counteracts the often too great slickness of your typical US digital animation by using glitches, smudges, and influences of the parts of visual arts that aren’t slick, but never as a pose like those movies that add artificial burn marks tend to do. Instead, the added grubbiness and grit is part of the aesthetics as well as of the thematic mission of a film that’s telling us that old, true story of the deep worth of the weird, the freakish, and the slightly off in the proper way, by being all that itself. It’s also disarmingly charming, fast, fun, clever and energetic in a way only a very stubborn kind of anarchist would not call anarchic.

Really, the only element of the film I had some trouble with its need to make its moral (shudder) as explicit as possible during its final act, because if there’s one strain running through the most conservative and the most progressive US art meant for children and their families, it’s the assumption of such braindead stupidity, you apparently have to tell them badly what you’ve just shown them much more convincingly. Of course, the rest of the film is so riveting, fun and outright charming, featuring some of the best uses of classic hip hop and even ESG you’ll encounter anywhere, and so convincingly positive – not naïve -  in its outlook, I’ll accept the fall into needless obviousness as its cost of doing business (and of getting Jackie Chan to voice act Splinter?).

Three Films Make A Post: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023): For large parts of its running time, this adaptation of the Mike Mignola, Richard Pace and Troy Nixey Elseworlds mini-series as directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu sticks rather closely to the original. In its first acts, its mostly makes some not terribly creatively handled gestures towards inclusivity it would have been weird not to include in 2023, and allows Oliver Queen a bit more heroism than the original had. For the finale, though, the script by Jase Ricci makes increasingly strange choices that muddle what was a pretty straightforward plot and climax in ways that seem weird, and pointless. I’d understand – if not like – changes to make things slicker or more contemporary, but farting around with a solid structure to replace them with a rickety construct of rotten wood makes little sense to me.

Otherwise, Doom certainly is one of the better DC animated features; it even shows some moments of visual creativity instead of the more factory like approach DC’S animation arm seems to prefer these days.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023): Whereas this misbegotten attempt at some sort of comedic Mission Impossible thing by Guy Ritchie is at times astonishingly bad: jokes never hit – and are generally underwritten - action set pieces are bland and lifeless, scenes that shouldn’t be in the film at all go on forever. Even at his worst – and I’d say that’s at least half of his output – Ritchie usually knows how to pace quick, usually at least semi-witty dialogue and seems to be a director who appreciates the qualities of a good cast, but you won’t even find any of that here. This is just a lifeless, glossy yet cheap-looking waste of a great cast.

Acidman (2022): For my taste, Alex Lehmann’s film never quite rises to the set-up of “woman’s (Dianna Agron) attempts to reconnect with her long-time estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) and fix her own hang-ups in the process is repeatedly interrupted by his obsession with UFOs and his Alzheimer’s”. The film’s neither sad nor weird enough to really pull the set-up off quite as effectively as one would wish it to, and much of it turns out to be a pretty middle of the road “woman meets dad” indie that doesn’t seem to dare to become as strange or emotional as it could and should. It’s a nice enough movie, mind you – it only wastes its potential to be more than that.

Short Film Friday: Stones

Three Films Make A Post: Still Partying Like It’s 2022

The Wonder (2022): I’ve read rather a lot of excited praise for Sebastián Lelio’s film, but I can’t say I can agree with much of it. Sure, on a technical level, this is a highly accomplished movie, but to my eyes, it is also one that doesn’t have as much substance as its form suggests. What is has to say about grief and female empowerment is rather on the trite and obvious side, its deliberate surface artfulness trying to distract from a lack of deeper thought at its core, its moments of hapless yet self-important fourth wall breaking notwithstanding.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022): In contrast, this little wonder of puppet animation by del Toro and Mark Gustafson is just as surface artful in its own way, but it also has – despite much more obvious emotionality and plotting – much more depth on any level: emotionally, politically, aesthetically and intellectually. It is also much less po-faced in its approach to the surprising number of things it talks about – from the problems of fathers and sons, over fascism, death, to the troubles of homeownership when you’re a grasshopper. This doesn’t mean it lacks seriousness in its thinking. Rather, the film treats humour and warmth as important parts of the human experience even under circumstances full of suffering and grief, not allowing itself or its viewers to lose sight of the totality of life.

Count Magnus (2022): Mark Gatiss’s newest Ghost Story for Christmas – again based on a tale by M.R. James, obviously – seems to have been the least well-regarded of the irregular series until now. Admittedly, the tale takes a bit too long to get going, with a talky beginning that’s less than ideal in a thirty minute piece. Particularly in its early stages, it looks terribly stagey and nearly aggressively digital, the BBC’s unwillingness to give Gatiss a decent budget showing to ill effect.

I found myself reconciled with the tale once it got going, though. Even though it never reaches the height of the original story – which is one my favourites of Monty’s – there are eventually some nicely creepy moments, despite the script keeping things a bit more removed from the viewer than even the James tale does, perhaps in reaction to the criticism of last year’s episode showing its monster somewhat longer.

The Fantastic Planet (1973)

Original title: Le Planète Sauvage

Somewhere, some time, a race of blue giants called the Traags live curious lives of psychic, machine-based learning and pretty psychedelic looking meditations. The latter seem to take up most of their time. Still, these people are down to Earth (or Ygam, in their case) enough to hold pets. Namely, what they call the Oms (a really subtle play on the French word “homme”, of course), little hairless monkey creatures they took on an expedition to a planet you might have heard of called Terra that seems to have become somewhat post-apocalyptic, the film suggests. The tale is narrated by the grown-up version of a little Om boy whose “owner”, the young daughter of a leader of the Traags, gave him the name “Terr”. Through happenstance, Terr gains access to the same psychic teaching material used to educate his owner, so he learns to speak and understand rather a lot about the peculiar world he finds himself in. Both will be very useful skills once a grown-up Terr flees into the wilds where small clans of escaped and free-born humans live and try to avoid the Traags’ regular attempts at exterminating what they only see as animal pests.

Eventually, Terr will become a catalyst in bringing changes to the relationship between the two races.

As a rule, I am not much of a fan of fantastic cinema – nor literature, for that matter – that trades heavily in the allegorical, even if, like in the case of French director René Laloux’s film here, I’m perfectly fine with the politics being allegorized. I’ve never quite understood why you’d use an allegory this obvious when you could simply straight-up say what you mean. There’s a strange thing about the simple and obvious allegory here, however, for if you read half a dozen pieces about the film, you’ll find half a dozen different readings of what the allegory actually means, from racism (which seems to me the clear and obvious reading), to animal rights, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which happened right when this was animated there, and drew out the production for years), or, if you’re Gene Siskel (together with his buddy Ebert always there for the most clueless view of any given genre movie), druggy nonsense. All of which might suggest something about the subjectivity of interpretation, even of the obvious.

Be it as it may, one of the virtues of Laloux’s film is its complete lack of a moralizing tone even while it tells a moral story. The plot itself – the script was written by Laloux with the great writer Roland Topor and is based on a novel by Stefan Wul – is about as simple and matter of fact as things go. This stands in grand contrast to Fantastic Planet’s biggest selling point for someone of my tastes: aesthetics where nothing looks straight, or straightforward, or seems to belong to the world a viewer might simply understand. The visual imagination on display maybe does owe a little to the drug trippyness of its production time, but rather more to surrealism and European traditions of non-naturalistic art. The diverging Czech and French approaches to the surrealist and the strange come together rather wonderfully into scenes that are at times alien, funny, grotesque, just plain weird, and always a little bit mind-blowing, really giving the whole thing the air of a tale neither taking place on the shores we know nor told there, adding the quality of watching a myth from a very different and strange place. This gives Fantastic Planet a particularly curious quality: of being absolutely of its time in its ideas about the world and how to present it and its general ideas about life, yet also so strangely situated in a place that never actually existed that it becomes something singular.

Three Films Make A Post: A hunter never leaves his prey wounded

Wounded (1997): A forest ranger played by Mädchen Amick gets into a pretty typical cat and mouse game with an insane poacher (Adrian Pasdar), after barely surviving a first encounter that left her partner and quite a few other people dead. The only person she trusts is an alcoholic cop (Graham Greene). Directed by Richard Martin in a somewhat slick and impersonal manner, this one really lives from a handful of fine performances. Amick, if you can suspend your disbelief far enough to imagine her as someone who spends most of her time outside, does a very credible job with a character wavering between grief, trauma and anger, Greene is his typical low-key inspired self, and Pasdar does pretty sociopathy and murderous scenery chewing very well indeed.

Structurally, this would probably have needed some extra hook, but still stays a pretty worthwhile hidden gem for the acting ensemble alone.

The Creeping Flesh (1973): This Tigon production is certainly not director Freddie Francis’s best, mostly because the script by Peter Spenceley and Jonathan Rumbold never quite seems to have decided what exactly it wants to do with some very Nigel Kneale-ish ideas, and so does quite a few things, none with much follow-through. But it still has the visual flow and flair typical of Francis even on his bad days, and fun work by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as half-brothers with their own respective brands of mad science. Particularly Lee is spectacularly nasty here once he gets going, contrasting nicely with Cushing’s more sympathetic (yet still horrible) kind of mad scientist.

The film features a complicated and not unproblematic view on mental illness and heredity, particularly when female sexuality comes into the mix, but also quietly suggests that certain male behaviours, even well-meant ones, might be among the root causes of the problem there.

If only the titular Creeping Flesh would make its appearance earlier (or, alternatively, only be a metaphor).

The Summit of the Gods aka Le sommet des dieux (2021): While I’m too much of a coward to ever do any climbing myself, I find mountain climbing and its philosophical and psychological underpinnings endlessly fascinating. Consequently, I find this animated French (though based on a Jiro Taniguchi manga and very Japanese in visual style) film directed by Patrick Imbert about mountain climbing, obsessive men, and the reasons for their obsessions very fascinating indeed.

It uses a flashback structure flawlessly, draws its characters clearly and with surprising complexity, and often looks very beautiful indeed, staging suspense, tragedy and the handful of moments when it wanders off into the slightly surreal all with the same calm capability.

Frightful Friday: Kisaragi Station

This is a very neat - if typo-infested - animated adaptation of one of the classics of Japanese creepypasta.  Japanese creepypasta is a fascinating parallel world when you're mostly experienced with the US/UK version of the genre, with elements you'll recognize very well indeed, and others you'd never encounter in Western variations of the form.

In short: Justice Society: World War II (2021)

The Barry Allen Flash (Matt Bomer) is vibrating too hard (or something) while trying to catch a kryptonite bullet meant for Superman and finds himself sucked into what he first assumes to be the past, World War II. There, he teams up with a JSA version led by an - apparently Eastern European going by her accent - Wonder Woman (Stana Katic).

Theoretically to kick Nazi butt, but the weird, episodic plotting of this animated movie eventually provides other butts to kick.

The whole thing, as directed by Jeff Wamester, is a rather middling affair, animated with a kind of cell-shade look that never quite commits and ends up looking weirdly generic for the approach, decently – but not better – voiced, and which suffers from a pretty weak script by Jeremy Adams and Meghan Fitzmartin. There are several problems here: first, there’s the whole Future (actually SPOILER) Flash angle that adds exactly nothing to the World War II business, has no pay-off except one of those interminable valuable lessons to be learned (that is to say, an anti-payoff). Hell, Barry doesn’t even have anything of import to do in the grand finale at all, and is probably only in the movie because someone higher up in the development ladder became afraid the audience might be confused by a film headlined by Wonder Woman (I am being sarcastic here). The Barry business takes up quite a bit of valuable space, too, so there’s not enough left for the short hand characterisation of most of the rest of the cast beyond Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, so that their supposed character arcs all seem to have a beginning and an end but no middle whatsoever, destroying the impact of something like a less heroic becoming the Superman, and killing most of the emotional beats in the climax stone cold dead.

There’s little dramatic flow to the narrative in general, and the second half of the film seems to belong to rather a different movie than the first one altogether. At least it’s one with more interesting set pieces.

In short: Borley Rectory (2017)

This is a lovely animated documentary by Ashely Thorpe about one of Britain’s favourite haunted places, Borley Rectory, home of haunted vicars, a dead nun with a habit of staring into your window when you’re trying to eat, a headless coachman and many a rock thrown by Harry Price (or ghosts, depending on one’s preferences).

The film is putting all kinds of these wild and less wild tales into a mix of rotoscoped actors, digital as well as hands-on animation, with narration by Julian Sands, and people like Reese Shearsmith and Jonathan Rigby involved in the acting. This seems rather heavily involved with a certain generation of intelligent (mostly male) British horror etc people like the above mentioned and works in its animated documentary format on parallel interests to them: the Usborne Book of Ghosts is invoked, Stephen Volk is quoted, the gothic elements of the best Borley Rectory stories are put to the fore, and there’s a playfulness that never devolves into wink-wink nudge-nudge style irony on display. The film’s highly distinctive visual style creates the properly spooky mood, meant to feel as if the viewer is gazing at old film material run through a digital filter, and meeting this goal wonderfully. There’s a vein of nostalgia apparent here to, and, given the artificiality of the form Thorpe has chosen, one that is very conscious of the fact it is nostalgia for a time, perhaps things, that never really did exist. I believe one can fairly use the “hauntology” label here.

Of course, if you want your supernatural documentaries to be either involved in debunking or long conspiratorial speeches about them trying to keep the truth hidden, this is most probably not going to be for you. When it comes to its hauntings, Borley Rectory is decidedly uninterested in questions of truth and fakery, deciding to tell the story of a place that has taken on the quality of folklore as such stories should be told.

In short: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959)

Czech puppet animation pioneer Jirí Trnka’s free adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play (if anyone should need the plot to this one, please make your way across the Internet to various deposits of literature free of that pesky copyright) is the sort of film that leaves me in two very different minds.

On one hand, this is an aesthetic masterpiece, with some beautifully crafted puppets full of exquisite detail, moving in a light and delicate manner through backgrounds of inspired – and again exquisitely and meaningfully detailed – artistry. The film is also directed with much more taste and art than just going for filming what would amount to stages (as would have been much more typical in this style of animation at the time), providing life and further elegant movement via the camera, bringing everything to poetic life. A life also bathed in astonishing colours, Trnka clearly understanding use and meaning of colour to create an unreal mood.

It is all utterly beautiful to look at, showing so much grace and style the film’s main problem (aka the other hand) seems nearly preposterous. You see, while the English language version seems to feature dialogue, the Czech language print I saw replaces the words of that totally obscure and barely literate Shakespeare guy with an off-screen narrator who never stops telling what the film shows. Seriously, it’s such a bizarre decision, I can’t help but think the film would have been better off with having neither dialogue nor that narrator. Anyone interested in the film knows the material anyway, and if you as an artist are dead set against using the words of Shakespeare (or rather his Czech translators), you might as well be consequent.

How much the loss of Shakespeare’s words in this Shakespeare adaptation will bother any given viewer is of course, as it always is, a matter of taste – there are after all more than enough films using them which still don’t amount to much. I found myself mostly flabbergasted by the decision, spending nearly as much time wondering about it as I did entranced by the beautiful pictures.

Three Films Make A Post: You'll never see them coming.

Deadsight (2018): I have to admit that I by now belong to the sad group of people who could live without another zombie/infected movie for about the next billion years. Having said that, I found Jesse Thomas Cook’s viral zombie style indie horror film surprisingly decent. At the very least, It is focussed and the the main cast do their jobs well. Why, Cook even manages to wring some genuine emotion out of some zombie movie standards by virtue of effective and efficient direction.

There are also some tiny yet not unimportant changes to your typical zombie movie rules, where infected are still conscious to a degree, which makes this particular version of the zombie plague rather more tragic, and turns at least some of the infected into people suffering horribly instead of merely dangers for the protagonists (Liv Collins, who also co-wrote, and Adam Seybold) to get through.

A Whisker Away aka Nakitai Watashi wa Neko wo Kaburu (泣きたい私は猫をかぶる) (2020): This Toho anime by Mari Okada about a middle school aged teen, her awkwardly (or creepily if you're really sensitive) expressed crush on a classmate and the troubles that come with turning oneself into a cat is a prime example of how much of an influence Studio Ghibli films still are on parts of anime filmmaking, seeing as this one quite desperately wants to be a Ghibli film, hitting as many buttons, tropes, and favourite Miyazaki concepts as it can get its paws on.

That’s only a bad thing on the originality front, though, for while this certainly can’t compare to Ghibli at its best (which is one of the troubles a film will get into when it prays so clearly at other films’ altars), it’s still a genuinely charming film that speaks about the pains of growing up with real affection and insight, doing the Japanese version of Magical Realism with charm and style. The final act could have used some trimming for my tastes, but otherwise, this is as good as pseudo-Ghibli is going to get.

Hoffmaniada (2018): More than a decade in the making, this Russian puppet stop motion animation directed by Stanislav Sokolov uses the great German Romantic writer (and not quite so great composer) E.T.A. Hoffmann’s life and elements of his work to talk about the borders between imaginary lives and real ones, the difficulty of more traditionally artistic temperaments to live in the world instead of their heads (also to recognize the difference between a woman and a freakish automaton), and the cruelty of said world to them. Which is about as Romantic as they come.


Quite appropriate for something with and about Hoffmann, the film contains a healthy dose of the grotesque, and while the animation isn’t always exactly slick (though never amateurish), that more handmade quality actually adds to its charms, turning Hoffmann’s world stranger than Hollywood slickness would, something that’s very appropriate to the film and its themes.

Three Films Make A Post: Think fast. Drive faster.

The Man Who Saw Too Much aka El hombre que vio demasiado (2016): I find Trisha Ziff’s documentary about Mexican tabloid photographer turned elderly art scene darling Enrique Metinides, and the relationship of Mexican mainstream culture to violence, utterly fascinating. Particularly, I love the film’s willingness to leave questions open, to accept that there are no absolute keys to understanding a person and what drives them; instead of providing solutions, it introduces us to the man and his work from all sides, leaving interpretations open and diverse, suggesting a man who might be a kind of folk hero, simply a commercial artist, a parasite on other people’s suffering, or a man who has seen way too much.

The only element of the film that rubs me the wrong way are the interview snippets of people from the US art scene, who provide little insight in many words, blithely ignoring the actual suffering in Metinides photos, replacing it with their half-baked ideas about suffering.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003): This one’s the final entry into the actual Timm/Dini/Reaves universe of Batman: The Animated Series but without Timm or Dini and little of the spark of what made B:TAS so great. The animation, while technically probably better than in the post B:TAS films that came before, is curiously lifeless, the design feeling as if the animators were going through the motions of reproducing a style without thinking too hard about what it’s there for. Reaves’s script is flabby and unconvincing, full of jokes that fall flat, and aiming for the detective side of Batman without constructing a decent mystery for him to solve.

There’s a sad lack of personality to the whole affair, so once again something great ends on something of a whimper instead of a bang. But then, the animated Batman has never quite left B:TAS behind even after this part of his world was officially closed.

Overdrive (2017): This mainly French production directed by Antonio Negret quite desperately wants to be a (The) Fast & (The) Furious film from the second half of that franchise’s run. Alas, it can’t actually afford the kind of effects and stunt work it would need for this, and nobody involved seems to have much of a clue about how to go about staging the kind of action the production can actually afford. But, hey, Scott Eastwood and his perfectly horrible screen presence was in the budget, as well as poor Ana de Armas.


The script is dire, too, as if it were written by people who mistakenly believe that making formulaic movies is easy; that’s only the bad formulaic movies nobody wants to see. 

In short: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1996)

If were a cynical man, I’d call this, the first cinematic animated outing by the team that brought us the truly classic “Batman: The Animated Series” a low effort film. But that’s mostly because the film aesthetically, in its love for media of the 30s and 40s and in its writing and philosophy as well as in its cast – of course including the Batvoice all Batvoices are measured against, Kevin Conroy and the just as perfect Joker Mark Hamill etc - is pretty much a longer, somewhat more costly episode of the TV show. Of course, in the case of BTAS, that’s more of a compliment than a criticism, unless one wants to complain about there being too many good things in the world when one encounters more than one good thing. Me, I’m rather happy with as many good things as possible existing, so a long, even more intricate version of a B:TAS episode is a perfectly lovely thing to me.

That is, of course, also because this version of the Batman is pretty much a perfect classicist version of the character, moving through an art deco Gotham the intermingles wonderfully with a plot that suggests a meeting of this Batman with various noir films when he comes upon a murderous vigilante (and yes, Batman not killing is important, whatever a certain director thinks or, alas, babbles, as much as is, say, The Punisher, indeed killing) as well as the woman (Dana Delaney) who nearly made him rethink becoming the Dark Knight. There are so many nuances and subtle touches, visually and in the writing, here, the intelligence, the love for classic Hollywood as well as for the Dark Detective himself basically jump off screen in every single scene.


The filmmakers - directing credits go to Eric Radomski, Bruce Timm and Kevin Altieri, and writing to Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko and Michael Reaves – repeat everything they did right with the TV show, make it just a little bigger, and turn out something rather magical.

Die Sieben Raben (1937)

aka The Seven Ravens

Closely following the version of the fairy tale as written down by the Brothers Grimm, this early example – the Internet tells me it is the third of its kind but counting firsts has never been its strength – of a puppet stop motion animated film tells the tale of a girl who learns from her parents that she once had seven brothers. Her brothers were turned into ravens and flew away after her father muttered an unkind wish when they didn’t come back with the water for the (then) baby girl’s emergency baptism they were sent to catch from the nearest well. Apparently, there have been unkind words among their neighbours about the whole affair ever since – turns out, in the realm of fairy tales, this is not the sort of occurrence to produce horror but gossip.

Anyway, once the girl learns about these matters from her mother, she sets out to put thing right and find their brothers, for she has the heightened sense of responsibility that in today’s pop culture would combine perfectly with a spandex costume. Ergo, she wanders off into the woods telling everyone she meets plaintively that she’s looking for her brothers. Eventually, she encounters a fairy (the girl calls her “good” but I dunno). The fairy explains that the raven brothers (brother ravens?) are now living in a mountain of glass but she will turn them back into humans and send them home if the girl swears to not speak for seven years and weave seven shirts for her seven brothers. The girl, clearly going for saintliness here, agrees, and moves into a tree where she befriends animals and spins, spins, spins. Until six years later, the local ruler comes upon her, is instantly smitten with her beauty and poise, and makes her his wife. Note to the modern viewer: she seems pretty okay with it. This, not surprisingly, is only the beginning of more troubles and suffering.

The brothers Ferdinand and Hermann Diehl were pioneers of puppet stop motion animation in Germany – and not just here – working together from 1929 until 1970 (with a couple of things done by a single brother alone afterwards), mostly making their mark through fairy tale adaptations like this one but not shying away from other source materials. If you are a German of a certain age, you’ll probably have vague childhood memories about having seen something they’ve done on TV when you were little.


And the brothers’ work is well worth remembering. Their version of stop motion isn’t quite as slick as what later creators in the style would deliver, a certain stiffness coming from the more traditional puppets they are working with as well as from their decision to give their puppets animated mouths but keep the rest of their faces still and unmoving. To me, however, watching something like Die Sieben Raben is still totally engrossing. In part, it’s because this, like the best of the Diehls’ work I’ve encountered (though not at all like everything they ever did) doesn’t try to play over their source material’s sombre and upsetting elements to console a family audience. In fact, it’s exactly the sombre and sometimes even upsetting tone that’s responsible for most of the surprising emotional the impact of the film, and I assume very much the point of the whole affair. This is not so much a tale of wonder but one of suffering and endurance by a saintly woman, closer in spirit to the female-centric melodrama of a couple of decades later than you’d expect from a stop motion puppet fairy tale. It is also a film that realizes that fairies in folklore are utter pricks with a decided sense of self-righteous cruelty; and as in folklore, it’s best to avoid telling the fairy you’re having business with that.