Jasper Sharp : Hayao Miyazaki

Currently browsing Hayao Miyazaki:

12
Aug

Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet on Blu-Ray

Now on Blu-Ray, Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973)

Up until a couple of months ago you’d have been hard pressed to explain to me the point or the necessity of getting a Blu-Ray player, but there’s been a number of releases recently that have made me change my mind about the new format. A good deal of these have come courtesy of the Eureka label, including the exclusive releases of F.W. Murnau’s City Girl, which I aim to cover on this site soon, and Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods, which I’ve just reviewed as part of the latest Midnight Eye update. The UK-based distributor is now also in the process of upgrading some of the more popular titles from its Masters of Cinema range to exploit the medium’s fuller possibilities, with July’s releases including another classic Imamura title, Vengeance is Mine, which I reviewed on Midnight Eye when the original DVD came out a number of years ago, and René Laloux’s trippy 1973 animation Fantastic Planet. I wrote something about this for Twitch when the DVD came out, but since the new Blu-Ray version is considerably expanded from this original release, I thought the best way to go was to present my original review here in a slightly re-edited version, with added comments pertaining to this reissue. Here goes, then…

Psychedelic French sci-fi from Rene Laloux

Back in 2006, Eureka was responsible for the UK DVD debut of René Laloux’s psychedelic animated sci-fi, Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage), which represented the first time the company had dipped their toes into the animation pool with their Masters of Cinema series, and it was particularly refreshing to see a company out there with the belief that animators are just as eligible for cinéastic canonisation as their live-action counterparts. Until then, there had been, and in fact still is really, a general tragic dearth of DVD releases of non-American or non-Japanese animation, and if anything Laloux’s 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winner serves to remind us of the rich tradition in European animation that bridges the gap between these two extremes.

It is almost de rigeur to cite Hayao Miyazaki’s seal of approval on any slightly off-centre animated release, but the claim on the cover blurb of the Blu-Ray and DVD that this adaptation of Stephan Wul’s novel ‘Oms en série’ “can be seen to prefigure much of the work” of the director of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away still seems pretty apt: it’s easy to spot more than a passing resemblance between this film’s depiction of two warring races battling it out in a hallucinogenic alien landscape of bizarre vegetation and strange buildings with that of Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind.

Rene Laloux provided an early influence for Miyazaki

The story charts the hostilities between the blue-skinned, red-eyed, web-eared Draags and the more traditionally humanoid but miniscule Oms (Nausicaa featured ‘Ohms’) with whom they share an antagonistic existence on the same planet of Ygam. One of the Om’s is plucked from his mother’s bosom as a baby by Draag girl Tiwa, re-christened Terr and raised as a pet. Tiwa is an indulgent keeper to Terr, nurturing him to adulthood and pumping him full of knowledge from the Draag’s shared information pool. The other Draags however, are complete shits, in one scene tying the hair of two tiny Oms together and forcing them to fight to untangle themselves. But soon Tiwa too becomes bored with her new plaything, allowing Terr to escape into the wild and share his knowledge with a tribe of wild Oms. But by this time the Draag’s are stepping up their plans to begin the merciless process of ‘de-omisation’ and rid the planet of their verminous competitors.

Oms vs. Draags

Blessed with an all-pervading psychotropic atmosphere and a wonderfully trippy soundtrack from Alain Goraguer’s not to dissimilar to the later work of Gallic retro-boppers Air, Fantastic Planet whisks you right back to the early 70s (the full soundtrack is included on the new Blu-Ray, a welcome addition, but I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to include it on a separate CD? If you want to listen to it now, you basically have to do so through your TV rather than a CD player, using up a lot of electricity and boosting your carbon footprint in the process. Maybe there’s a way around this, but I’ve yet to discover it). I hesitate to use the word ‘surreal’, because it has become so dulled by overuse as to become almost meaningless, but if there was an animated work that warranted such a label, it is this one. Be warned though – the drug-inspired and often highly sexualised designs complete with images of bare-breasted aliens will probably deter the more Victorian-minded from presenting this to their pre-teens as a Disney substitute. This is definitely one to be filed under the category of “adult art animation”.

Included on the Blu-Ray is Alain Goraguer's gloriously retro soundtrack

That said, it is also doubtful whether most modern-day adults will pick up on the underlying metaphor. The humanoid ‘Oms’ and the domineering Draags were regarded at the time as a allegory for the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslavakia, although in this respect it is also worth quoting from Craig Keller’s brilliant essay ‘The Schizophrenic Cinema of René Laloux’, contained in the disk’s accompanying booklet, which makes the astute comment that “One might reflect on the connotations inherent to names like Terr (“terre” is French for “earth”), Oms (“hommes” = “men,” “mankind”), and Draags (“drogues” = “drugs”), although searching for a more complex allegorical interplay between these three referents is unlikely to result in anything that can be said to scan sensibly.” The film was in fact a French-Czech co-production made at Jiri Trnka’s studios in Prague (where the Japanese stop-motion puppet animator Kihachiro Kawamoto also served an apprenticeship earlier in the decade – in fact, as much as Terry Gilliam’s animated interludes for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Laloux’s film bears a distinct similarity in ambience and design to Kawamoto’s collage animation The Trip (Tabi), which also critiqued the Soviet invasion). In marked contrast to Kawamoto’s happy experiences in Prague however, the five years it took to complete Fantastic Planet were allegedly something of nightmare for the French animator, who was almost ousted from the director’s chair by various Czech rivals during the production.

Don't mess with Draags, kids

All of this information, and a good deal more regarding Laloux’s background and that of his collaborator, the illustrator-musician-writer-filmmaker Roland Topor, is contained in one of Eureka’s customarily informative colour booklets, which at 56 pages is now double the size of the one included with the original DVD release. The Blu-Ray package also expands on the number of Laloux’s other short films from the two included first time round (his 1965 cut-out collaboration with Topor, Les Escargots, and a really intriguing cel-animated piece created long after his association with the illustrator had ended, this time realised with the staff of Pyongyang animation studios in 1987, entitled Comment Wang-Fo Fut Sauvé) to five.

Classic animated surrealism, Les Escargots (1965)

The first of these shorts to be included, Les Dents du Singe (1960), is a real treat. Basically, the story of how Laloux got into the world of animation is pretty weird in its own right. He actually started off working at La Borde Psychiatric Clinic in Cour-Cheverny in 1956, a sort of progressive lunatic asylum in which the inmates were encouraged to participate in creative activities as part of their treatment. Laloux oversaw the first of these, Tic-Tac (1957), a live-action shadow puppet theatre in the vein of Lotte Reiniger and filmed in 16mm monochrome that somehow ended up on French television. This was followed by his first colour film Les Achalunés, shot using backlit pieces of tinted glass. Sadly, neither of these are included on the disk, although clips from Tic-Tac appear in the 27-minute French documentary from 2003 entitled Laloux Sauvage, in which Laloux gets to tell his bizarre life-story firsthand. Anyway, Les Dents du Singe (1960) was the last such collaboration with the clinic’s inmates, and the one that effectively propelled him into a new phase in his artistic career, marked by his fruitful association with Roland Topor.

Well, there’s clearly a lot to be said about Laloux’s idiosyncratic output, so I’d advise anyone interested to check out this great new release of a truly wonderful film. I ended my review of Eureka’s first DVD of this film in 2006 thus: “Having gorged myself on the contents of this beautiful disk several times now, I am left with an overwhelming appetite to see more of Laloux’s mesmerizing work in the animation field. His 1988 feature Gandahar sounds really intriguing… Anyone at Eureka listening?” Well, whether they were listening specifically to me or not (probably not, let’s face it), Eureka did end up releasing a DVD of Laloux’s final animated feature (btw, not only was Gandahar also animated in North Korea, but equally bizarrely, a certain Bob Weinstein is credited as the producer of the English-laguage version), and also his 1982 feature Les Maîtres du Temps. Perhaps these will be due for a Blu-Ray upgrade soon too?

Stephan Wul's novel of Fantastic Planet now published in English by Creaton Books

As a quick postscript, I should mention that Stephan Wul’s 1957 novel on which Lalous based his animation is now available in an English-language translation from Creation Books. There’s a bit of info on Wul in the Blu-Ray booklet too. Apparently his primary profession was not as a science fiction writer, but as a dentist, a profession which he found considerably more lucrative despite the high regard his stories were held in (although let’s face it, no one is talking about the quality of his root canal work now, are they).

Posted at 16:55 on 12 August 2010

Filed under news.

29
Dec

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

James Cameron's Avatar

Like many of us, I’ve been indulging in my fair share of festive film-watching this past week, both catching up on some of the year’s more important titles and looking back to past gems. As the decade draws to a close, it would be difficult not to give some mention of the talking-point title of the holiday season, James Cameron’s Avatar, although having just come more or less fresh from it, I’m not sure quite what to make of it in terms of its self-touted status as a landmark in film history. For the first 40 minutes or so, I was absorbed in the immersive detail of its alien world, before the sheer idiocy of the story loomed into the foreground: one-dimensional characters and plots in a three-dimensional world. There’s no need to go into too much detail regarding the story, as I’m assuming many of you have already seen it, and if not, you’ll probably already have heard that it’s a banal hotchpotch of Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Princess Mononoke and Fern Gulley – yes, the soundtrack even includes pan pipes. The end impression, however, was something akin to how I felt coming out of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake. All very impressive, yes, but just how significant is it in the long run? Will we still be talking about the film in a couple of years, and just how will it play on the small screen?

Just as the Final Fantasy film did, Avatar got me thinking about technology and cinema, this time primed by the fact that I’m currently absorbing the implications contained within the opening chapters of Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation , Thomas Lamarre’s fascinating and perceptive look at how technology has influenced the form and content of Japanese animation, and basically THE book I’ve always been waiting for on the subject. One of the axioms of Lamarre’s argument is that cinema’s development has been shaped by its technology, the movie camera, which allows movement in three dimensions, and enforces a strictly rational viewing mode upon the world, that of vanishing point perspective, whereas the basic machinery from which animation is constructed, the animation stand, provides a very different means of lending the illusion of three dimensions to its images, with the camera shooting from a fixed position and the way that the individual layers of cels are composited to work with one another just as, if not more important than the actual drawings upon them. He labels the differences cinematism, a dynamic, cine-realistic interpretation of the world, and animetism, an aesthetic unique to anime born of the machinery that produces it. Both, however, are only means of arriving at representations of the world: artists and psychologist have been arguing for at least the past century that this is not how humans actually perceive their environment.

James Cameron's Avatar

Of course, the use of digital technologies over the past 20 years has revolutionised the way animation is made, and its aesthetic, but I think it is particularly interesting that Japanese animators have made judicious aesthetic decisions to either reject computer technology for the very purposes for which it is most suited (i.e. movement in depth), as is the case of Hayao Miyazaki, or explore other ways of representing ideas with it, the best example of which being Mamoru Oshii’s The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters. After all, why use a purely man-made medium that is so intrinsically non-rooted in reality to emulate the lens-based reality that has so defined the last century? I’ve written about this phenomenon in some depth, notable in a series of articles for the magazine 3D World, and in my chapter “Between Dimensions: 3D Computer Generated Animation in Anime”, included in Ga-Netchu: The Manga Anime Syndrome published by the Deutsches Filmmuseum back in 2008, although due to word-count constraints in this publication was not able to pursue my ideas as much as I would have liked. My basic view is that cinema of any description always requires a suspension of disbelief. Cinematic realism (cinematism) is only one way of representing the world, and total onscreen realism is a straw man. The more you strive for cinematic realism, which in the case of animation means adding more visual detail and more dynamic movement within three dimensions, the further you depart from reality, or the more you draw attention to the unreality of cinerealism. The new vogue for 3D cinema only emphasizes these points.

avatar4

The visual aesthetic in Avatar attempts to dazzle with its spectacle. That is its purpose, and perhaps I’m being unfair, it is its only purpose. It has always been thus with Cameron – think Terminator 2. He delights in showing us what is possible at the cutting edge of technology. We are to be as much impressed with the machinery behind what’s onscreen as what’s onscreen itself. Avatar’s tragedy, perhaps more so than Final Fantasy, is that it fails to find its own unique form within its technical possibilities. It is pure cinematism. There was a brilliant article by Ben Walters and Nick Roddick earlier this year in the March edition of Sight and Sound, entitled “The Great Leap Forward” that looked at some of the considerations that filmmakers working in 3D need to consider; rapid editing forces the viewer to change their focal point quickly, leading to headaches, but also jolting them out of the onscreen world, while in contrast, long moving shots make one feel very much part of it. It brings about its own set of problems too – just where does one put the subtitles along the depth plane? Nevertheless, there is still a sense of liberating potential about the new technology, if used inventively, to revolutionise film aesthetics and the way we experience cinema. Rather than constructing action sequences by editing together lots of short, explosive shots to create the illusion of an impossible, dynamic hyper-realism, perhaps the new aesthetic should be a return to longer, more fluid sequences that fully exploit cinematic depth, focussing on the created worlds and how, by way of proxy through the characters who inhabit them (our avatars), audiences interact with them. For a while Avatar managed this. I revelled in every magical detail of the lush jungle planet environs of Pandora. But then it was back to fiction once again.

Form and content are inextricably linked, a factor which animators as diverse as Mamoru Oshii and the talents at Pixar seem to understand perfectly. It doesn’t help that from a narrative point of view, Avatar’s corollaries with real-world events are too obviously silly; an alien race whose blue reptilian skin and flattened noses serve as indicators of their otherworldly status (though their bare, body-painted torsos and Maasai braids seem rather closer to home) sitting on vast resources of the precious resource unobtainium (you couldn’t make this stuff up) are infiltrated and subsequent invaded by mechanized, militarized cartoon-evil humans with America accents. We’re firmly rooted in la-la land here, with nothing to take back home to reality with us. It’s all about about as heartfelt as the ersatz anti-Neocon tract of one of the daftest films of the decade, Eagle Eye. The underlying message is that war, imperialism and explosive violence may be bad things, but nevertheless, they provide the building blocks for a certain kind of action cinema born out of the 1980s, one in which bodies can fall hundreds of metres without so much as bruising, in which whole worlds are created only to be destroyed, and we can all go home with the cosy feeling that it was all only a movie, only a movie, only a movie…

James Cameron's Avatar

Avatar was unfortunate to have been preceded into theatres this year by Coraline and Up, neither of which can be described as “realistic” in the same sense as current conceptions of “reality” – the reality of cinema and computer games – and yet which, adopting a more simplistic visual style, were far more convincing, far more immersive in their story-telling and their action sequences, and far more attuned to the aesthetic considerations brought about by the addition of an illusionary third dimension. For me, both ranked among the best of the year, fully cinematic experiences that I will treasure for a long time. James Cameron’s fascist aesthetic feels more like an evolutionary dead end than the the future of cinema, which for me seems to be better represented by Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker , and it’s evident that if the resurrection of 3D is to be any more than just the gimmick it was in the 1950s or its brief revival in the 1980s, then its possibilities must be used more inventively. I think I’ve already reached the saturation point where I won’t go and see a film just to be dazzled by the 3D unless it can do something new, a state I reached with CG animation in the ake of Toy Story around the time of the appearance of Ice Age. I’m less excited by Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland than Takashi Shimizu’s The Shock Labyrinth, because I think that given his Juon films, Shimizu’s handling of depth and shadow to create shock and suspense are going to result in something that I haven’t seen before. In the meantime, I adhere to the belief more strongly than ever that cinema is a delicate smoke-and-mirrors balancing act between what you show and what you don’t. By showing us everything from every conceivable angle, Avatar leaves no room for the imagination, making us painfully aware that actually there’s nothing really there.