canonical momentum

Nobody was one of the films I most wanted to see at the festival, after it came highly recommended by Animation Obsessive and also apparently completely blew up the Chinese internet. it's actually an expansion on one of the films we watched a couple years back on Animation Night 141. director Yu Shui, that's the guy in black...

really struck a chord with that one, and spent the years since then expanding it into a full length movie.

so what's it about? a group of yao, on the run at the bottom of the hierarchy hear about the approach of the Tang Monk from Journey to the West and get the idea to impersonate the famous group, going out ahead of them to get the Buddhist scriptures, and relying on Sun Wukong's fearsome reputation to sell the ruse. naturally it gets a lot more complicated.

it's a great premise already - a chance to interact playfully with a story everyone (at least, everyone in China) knows without ever really undermining it, while still having a very sincere emotional throughline in a story about the characters growing into their assumed roles. but what makes it go even more are the absolutely wonderful character interactions, this film just has a completely charming sense of humour through and through, perfectly paced to get enough time to really get to know these characters.

and while it's a comedy, it's still absolutely beautiful with it, full of incredible ink-wash backgrounds and fun movement - and some absolutely splendidly animated fights as well, able to seamlessly mix awesome martial arts, drama and physical comedy with the best of them. the comedy manages to make tropes like a 'special move' built up throughout the film still feel fun and fresh; the emotional depth makes the comedy work. just one of those cases of all the elements working together really really well.

in many ways this does seem like something very true to the post-Flash era Chinese animation subculture which produced directors like Busifan. it feels like it has a lot in common with e.g. Dahufa or The Legend of Hei, but its characters are a lot less... distant, I guess?

yvette spent nearly two hours queuing for it (while I had lunch and then used my res to secure us good seats lol), came out the theatre crying, and felt it was entirely worth it. her review is here

and yep yu shui stuck around after the film to chat a bit with people, sign things and even kindly posed for a photo with us...

so yeah, watch Nobody, it really is that good. in cinema ideally, it's really good on a big screen, though i have no idea if a wider western release is coming

as usual the blogging is falling further and further behind because annecy!bryn has quite a maximalist approach to the festival, and tuesday really lived up to that.

Started Tuesday with the Off-Limits block, which is where Annecy puts the sorts that are too abstract experimental for the main competition categories. as ever that makes for a pretty wild mix of stuff.

some cool ones included XYZ, which takes advantage of the repetitive architecture of what seems to be some kind of hospital or office building to create this fascinating effect with strobing match cuts, the camera gradually floating around the building in more and more complex arcs. possibly the most photosensitive epilepsy triggering film ever, but if you don't get that, hell of an experience. i came out calling it 'the architecture one' and yvette called it the 'sissy hypno one'

another very cool one was Evacuations, which set us up with a series of photos of empty spaces before filling them with flickering paint streak people with a lot of delightful visual gags. as the film advanced the backdrops fell away and the frames started layering in a really cool way.

CORE DUMP was the most directly representative one, depicting a huge swarm of scavenging drones like flies on a huge rubbish patch, from the point of view of one of those drones. pretty crazy camerawork, potentially motion sickness inducing as the drone dives into tunnels, but what a compelling image.

Merrimundi was one of the strangest, featuring a chorus of unfurling paper dolls alternating monologues about how the viewer is obsolete with songs in Latin. maybe slightly on the long side but it did get yvette to turn to me and ask 'is this what plurality is like' which was pretty funny. (i mean sure lol, good a metaphor as any)

overall: solid block, good stuff.

we're already a day behind in annecy blogging, this is going great girls x3

two films yesterday! first we had The Orbit of Minor Satellites, which is one of those tiny team idiosyncratic passion project films, similar to e.g. Jinsei last year. the film is a depicts a psychiatrist's sessions with a patient, interspersed with the story of a scifi station that she is imagining in which a group of cosmonauts attempt to establish a base on a moon of Saturn, inhabited also by a giant buffalo which speaks only in Boris Karloff sound clips. on the face of it, it sounds really intriguing; in practice it ended up kind of dragging a lot. shame but still glad to have rolled the dice on this one.

in the evening, we had Rogue Trooper, adapting the 2000AD comic, and the animation debut of Duncan Jones (the Moon guy, and also David Bowie's son it turns out??) this was just about the most 2000AD thing we've ever seen; the slightly exaggerated animation designs and the noxious planet they inhabit feel much truer to the vibe of the comic than a live action film could. this does end up having a bit of a computer game feel at times, particularly in the early sequence where the Genetic Infantry show what they're about by blowing up a gigantic city-scale tank guarded by hordes of mooks, but ultimately the film settles into its rhythm which is mostly about encountering a series of fucked up guys (and one girl).

this is a complaint that goes back to the original comic (i recall liz sandifer bringing it up in last war in albion), but the story really seems to want to have its cake and eat it on the subject of war: it is presented as a pointless war over nothing but it's also wwii in space with the southers as space tommies and the norts as something like space nazis, scary gasmasked dudes who you can kill as much as you like. not because they're doing anything uniquely evil in this setting, mind, they're just the enemy. for all that souther command is jokingly corrupt and prone to carrying out evil genetic engineering experiments, 19/rogue develops an ethic that's like 'i gotta save my brothers' and save their invasion effort from betrayal, which the narrative broadly sympathises with.

it's interesting to me how much this story parallels the much later YoRHa stage play/NieR Automata, and also how it differs. both stories are about disposable clone units sent to die needlessly in the space war; both have a conceit of soldiers getting reembodied if their mind data can be saved; both see the squad whittled down to a sole survivor who ends up in an antagonistic relationship to their command but still continues to fight the space war. but the characterisation of A2, which is about trauma and trust, is very different from the characterisation of Rogue, which is about how he's maybe a bit too much of a do-gooder but also the Coolest Guy. and notably, whatever sympathies NieR builds for its robot antagonists over the course of the story are entirely absent from Rogue Trooper.

one thing I do appreciate is that the ostensible immortality of the clone troopers turns out to be a lie, it's too expensive to keep the bodies around but they don't bother telling the clones. it never made a ton of sense that YoRHa bodies are so expensive but they've got loads of them sitting around in storage.

but yeah, this is all to say the whole thing is hilariously British about it, war is super duper hell and the lions may be led by donkeys but we sure gave jerry a good kicking didn't we lads...

but like I can't exactly complain that I went to see the sicknasty space violence movie and got a lot of sicknasty space violence. in a sense, Rogue Trooper feels like the full realisation what something like Star Wars The Clone Wars gestured at in its darker arcs, the all-consuming forever war akin to the 'Jungian parade' of The Second Renaissance. there's a lot of extremely cool acrobatic action shots. it's hard to believe that Unreal is capable of something like this, particularly all the nice volumetric smoke; we truly live in an era as far as realtime rendering is concerned.

anyway i did enjoy Venus, the cool girl with the muscles who (obvious spoiler) runs the tunneling underground bar. it's funny how macho mil-sf converges on lesbian aesthetics when it needs to have one cool girl, though the movie pretty quickly gets her flirting with one of the disembodied sorta-dead clones. apparently she's got her own comics line, i should check that out. we also got Diane Morgan (Philomena Cunk) as an evil space general, inspired casting choice there. (it uses some kind of mocap type thing to give everyone slightly caricatured, exaggerated proportions but still in a photoreal rendering style, a little uncanny but mostly it works)

it's very wild to see an expensive scifi film like this be so British with it. this feels like it will probably hit the right notes to take off, so perhaps we'll see more 2000AD adaptations down the line. nemesis the warlock anyone?

oh boy lots to note here!!

after Decorado in the morning came a little more unsuccessful queuing but then I got into the collection on war films, which in practice nearly exclusively meant films on the world wars in europe lol. these were a bit of a mix; at their best you had films like Uncanny Valley, which used the uncanny movement of pixilation (stop motion with human actors) along with distorted voices to create an incredible sense of desperation and (there it is again) dissociation, or the incredible psychedelic visuals of Mynarski Death Plummet. others like Paths of Hate were incredibly silly with it (though it is an impressive dogfight sequence).

war and death would really prove to be a theme today, in fact.

next came the main Short Films 1, which I got very lucky getting into in the queues. for the most part these were bangers; we even had a new film by Don Hetzfeldt, a very clever concept with a beautiful execution and a very sharp payoff. the idea is a human life depicted in the marks made on paper, from the earliest scribbles through learning to write, tests, letters... it's remarkable how expressive and clean hertzfeldt is able to make this; i assume he had some software help but regardless, it's an incredibly cool effect. i won't spoil where it goes here but it's powerful.

also immensely striking was Zsuzsanna Kreif's film Adgwa-Ata about the surreal ritual of a lesbian tf snake hypnosis cult, which has some absolutely incredible imagery. the cult are all depicted in this drag-influenced uniform with huge platform heels and incredibly long nails; they have some kind of connection to the plane of orbs, and the film depicts three girls being abducted to partake of the snake ritual.

I was all ready to go tell Yvette about how many absolute bangers this set had, but the last one, Danse Macabre, made the screening extra spicy. the film apparently involves 75 oil paintings, created over an eleven year period, combined with 3D and rotoscope to create an oil painted look in animation... by means of some kind of AI system, plus manual cleanup. viewed on a purely technical level this is probably the best I've seen such tools achieve; it has good temporal consistency and a consistent aesthetic and animation. but, this is the annecy festival and by this point, AI has gone from a novelty to a genuine threat, so this went down like an anvil. after a smattering of applause people started loudly booing; someone got in a shouting match with the director ("shame on you annecy festival!"), who gave up and gave the finger. I've never seen anything like it at Annecy, though I heard something similar happened last year.

tbh I can see where everyone is coming from. however defensible this film may be in isolation, nobody wants animation to go the way software development has been.

so what was this film even about? well, a huge army of skeletons descends on a city and executes the people by firing squad; having done this, the skeletons then start killing each other, rank after rank. if it was actually a metaphor for AI it would be painfully on the nose.

I did not get in to Welcome to Dolly's House; Yvette did and she says I didn't miss much. I went to the VR room instead, which is on a new 'reserve an hour and sample what you like' system this year, which seems like an improvement. I played an aesthetically very cool but technically kinda jank one about a gay couple lucid dreaming, which did some cool reprojection effects; and one about floods in Australia which was quite interesting in that it made all its assets out of paper. there's some intriguing looking stuff so I'll be back there tomorrow.

made it in to see Alberto Vazquez's new film Decorado! oldschool Animation Night-heads may remember his other films like Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (aka Psiconautas in Spanish) and Unicorn Wars, which we watched on Animation Night 178-9. like those other two films, Decorado is an elaboration on one of Vazquez's short films, which you can see here:

The structure of the short, with every scene ending in the chorus invoking 'Decorado', wouldn't quite work as a full length film, and so the narrative here is less fragmentary; nevertheless, it's pretty similar. Like Birdboy, we have a decaying dystopia in which everyone is miserably poor and getting by on shitty drugs, surrounded by impassable terrain and garbage. here, though, we have a more explicit pseudo-antagonist in the omnipresent ALMA corporation. it's a cartoon of an evil corp, but that's kind of the point; the whole thing is set up to feel derealising, and it's never quite clear what is diegetically 'real' or staged as earlier scenes are recontextualised.

there's an interesting repurposing of the 'big scary bird' imagery from Birdboy, here overtly antagonistic; the splattery gore of Unicorn Wars makes an understated return as well, lots of very abrupt and nasty deaths. with the sense of artificiality over everything and quite archetypal characters, and particularly the way it seemed to be approaching homeless characters, i wasn't entirely convinced it was going to work as well as birdboy at first, which did a great job of establishing sympathy for its kids, but it came together.

i enjoyed how the ending played with some of the cornier, 'only love is real' type endings of this type of dystopian movie. admittedly the only answer a lot of movies like this, which meticulously close off the idea of escape, seem to have is to get a bit weird and spiritual with it. but i mean, it's better to admit when you don't have an answer in this way, right?

it was interesting seeing explicit use of psychiatric terms like derealisation here.

today is the day when there are only a handful of films on so everything gets ludicrously booked out (it literally took a couple of minutes from festival reservations opening), queues are as bad as they get, etc. despite that, i got weirdly lucky and got into the quay brothers screening!

sponsor video this year is by Aardman, who've put together a characteristically cute thing with their character Morph accidentally messing with a stop motion shoot (and of course plenty of opportunities to shout Lapin!). this was followed by the first of the Gobelins intro films, in this case an incredibly gorgeous little Satoshi Kon-esque tribute to genre film...

as for the Quay brothers' work this is definitely on the Art Film end of the scale (the ones that weren't ads anyway), mostly mood pieces which, while they had some kind of narrative, were kind of obtuse with it. one of their earlier films is a tribute to Jan Švankmajer in which a doll boy learns from a book-headed stop motion character representing him, and indeed a recurring image is a doll-like character wandering through a dreamlike space, with the animators playing with objects like magnets and iron fillings and various sorts of distortion. they like their classical music as well...

a memorable one, In Absentia, depicted a woman struggling to write letters in a dissociative haze, the camera pushing in incredibly close on her fingers, the act of pencil sharpening, and the fate of the shavings and nibs; eventually the woman is revealed to be based on a real person who wrote from an asylum. it worked overall, though I think the length of the screening was just right, any more would have crossed the threshold.

following this came the first of this year's theme blocks, which is - delightfully - horror; in this case the block focused on the works of Stéphanie Lansaque and François Leroy, who have created a variety of increasingly horror oriented films set mainly in Vietnam but also Cambodia and Hong Kong. I actually remember one of these from my very first time 'attending' Annecy during the pandemic, and it was really cool to see it in context.

I'm not quite sure what motivated Lansaque and Leroy, who are both as far as I can tell white French people, to go and spend their whole careers making films about Vietnam and nearby countries, but it's undeniable they're pretty damn good at it. they make very interesting use of photos which are digitally puppet animated in a rather uncanny way; their characters also tend to have very little facial expression, just a rather distinctive stare. however, this is contrasted with a great deal of attention to naturalistic depiction of everyday life, preparing food, etc etc.

interactions between people and non-human animals are a huge theme; a lot of these shorts will frequently visit the POV of an animal like a fish or an octopus (that one gets a little Dream of the Fishermans Wife), and one entirely follows the POV of a dog. insects are also a big theme, as well as rats; they're very good at animating skittering. the stories tend increasingly from darkly ironic (a convoluted story of a child playing during the war, which eventually leads to him getting blown up by a piece of unexploded ordnance) to outright horror (a girl gradually loses her shit after the death of her mother, tormented by trying unsuccessfully to kill a rat, until she ends up killing a coffee deliveryman instead). but there is still a strangely muted affect to all of these; i guess i already used the d word but it really does give a powerful sense of dissociation.

there is one short animated horror film that came out last year about a krasue which I think, having seen these today, must have been by them because it has their style exactly - for whatever reason it wasn't in this programme.

i like their stuff! very effectively unsettling and very powerful atmosphere every time. The Awakening of the Insects makes way more sense with this context lol.

i considered joining the queue for Pilgrims, a Korean scifi film, but it was already wrapping around the outside of bonlieu with an hour still to go so I decided to come back and write this instead.

sadly yvette didn't have any luck with the queue on Lansaque and Leroy's block, coming within a few spaces of getting in - at least she wasn't waiting too long but god it is so brutal. i thought the new cinema de la cité would help relieve the pressure a little but so far no such luck!

got our badges, queued for a movie that we didn't get in to. tragically bdfugue no longer have an erotic comics/artbooks section? was quite excited to show that to yvette lol. still, got like four more years of annecy winners dvds, in case we want to try repeating animation night 186 at some point.

i did a terrific job packing and brought my laptop but not its charger, and my camera charger but not the camera. if only they were compatible, but alas.

yeah this slaps??? kickass performances, story hits the ground runnings with some absolutely top notch episodes. you can tell that they've taken everything they learned from writing TSV and kept pushing.

love what they're doing with the gender shit, which is way more foregrounded than it was in The Silt Verses: 'man' as gender neutral, elective 'wayman' and 'woman' and 'neither' roles, but also not shying from depicting homophobia mixed up in all the precisely observed nationalist resentment and everything; some fun Fantasy Slurs in there besides 'queer' lol. ep 3's background song about the theological implications of failing to spot the Big Man's dick with a telescope is perfect, 10/10 no notes etc.

there's some weird irony to listening to an episode about a suicide and a drug called 'mem' not long after a friend called mem killed itself. we can handle it but thanks for that one universe >_<

as we get more of a sense of how they tie together, all the themes about death, memories locked up in body parts and objects, and the mutable nature of things are really intriguing. even more so now we have a sense of what is waiting for these characters after they die and how that kind of works with the broader metaphysics of this story. like this deserves way more elaboration than we have time to write at this moment but goddamn do jon and muna have a knack for finding a compelling fantasy metaphor.

but the point isn't really to just build a big database query over fiction, or tick off a checklist. the point is to get something real in there, isn't it? a fictional character who's fucked up in a way that lets you say oh shit, that is exactly how it is, or a character who opens a door for you to become or understand something you could not previously imagine, is so much more than a character who legibly ticks off an identity box and gets an iso standard happy ending.

discussions of 'representation' are kind of whatever. we all need different things at different times. the stories we latched desperately on to ten years ago might now feel boring; the stories that speak most forcefully to us now might be inconceivably infuriating and upsetting in the frame of the creature that lived back then. characters who serve some vital role - a memorable depiction of grief, perhaps - may or may not tick the boxes. a certain amount of openness to interpretation is a good thing. and tbh, if you try and write a trans character (whatever kind of character) and 'screw it up' by the rubrics of this time, but you manage to successfully channel something of your very specific experience of the world and the meanings you've built to comprehend it, then i want to see that.