Taken at a face value, this short is very cool, a mix of music and Miro-like drawings and scenes that move very fast. More a play of music, colors and shapes than anything else. Enjoyable to watch, artistically interesting.
However, if you call any film Sonámbulo and you say that is based on the eponymous poem by Federico García Loca, I expect, really, something else.
Sonámublo and the book from which it is part, Gypsy Ballads, is one of my favorite books of poems ever. This poem has marked Lorquian themes, subjects and characters that are congruent with the whole book to which belongs. Although Lorca would then become more and more an abstract poet and more surrealist by the year (Poet in New York being the most surreal of his works to me) this poem and book use traditional ways of expression and format, but with non-traditional stories, symbols and subjects. His friend Dali harshly criticized this book and Garcia Lorca for being average, not surrealist enough, not avant-garde at all, and considered the book the example of a mediocre artist. Funny enough, Dali turned out to be totally mistaken, probably blinded by his own ego.
You have to know this to understand why Lorca would have never used a Miro-like imagery to depict the story of this poem. At this stage in his literary career, Garcia Lorca and Miro were on different artistic planets, if you know what I mean. Besides, Garcia Lorca had a very naive child-like whimsical drawing style, similar to that of Rafael Alberti, nothing that would remind us of Dali and even less of Miro.
The music is another distraction, because the Gypsy Ballads are more about flamenco music than anything else. Even a piece of classic music with some mix of pathos and playfulness would have benefited the story visually.
I am not saying that as an artist and animator you have to reproduce what Garcia Lorca might have done himself, I am saying that you have to capture the essence of the poem, the rhythm of the poem, the symbols of the poem, the music of the poem and make something that is not only yours and original, but also respectful with the original, that makes you say, this is Garcia Lorca but reinvented, not morphed into something else.
Unfortunately, to me, that is not the case.I watched this short with a sort of befuddlement because, to me, this film is clearly not very Garcia Lorca is more Miro's eye.
