Thomas J. McLean enters The Mist and discovers guerilla warfare from CafeFX.
When asked about the narrative techniques he used in his animation feature Azur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest, Michel Ocelot shrugs in a wonderfully Gallic manner. "I am a carpenter who wishes to create a table that lasts." Prompted to expand on this metaphor, he smiles, "... a carpenter who reads a lot of books."
Born in Guinea, Ocelot wanted to work on a piece that confronted the problems between the longstanding French citizens and the waves of immigrants from Arab countries. Asur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest tells the story of two boys raised as brothers by a North African wet nurse/mother. As the European prince comes of age, the African mother and her child are cast out. The quest begins when the European prince goes to seek out the fairy princess his mother told him about as a child, and finds himself a stranger in a strange land.
The story, completely of Ocelot's invention, sails the dangerous seas of political correctness effortlessly by keeping to the themes of brotherly resentment and love, and telling the immigrant's story from the point of view of the white prince. Another fascinating choice was to have one brother talk in Arabic without translation. "There is no 'tolerance' in my film," Ocelot replies when asked about this balancing act, "just intelligent people enjoying life."
And there is a good deal of enjoyment to be had in this film. The filmmaker stops at various moments in the narrative to look around at a beautiful graphic landscape, contrasting the solid bright djellabahs with the textured spices in a marketplace. Other outstanding sequences take us into the tiled wonder of an Arabic palace or the perfumed garden of a private home. These are moments in which one can luxuriate in the graphic and distinctly 2D flavor of the work like oases on a desert journey. "This is an animated film. I don't hide the fact that there are paints and brushes," he asserts. "If you are interested in reality, do live action; I've heard that it's very enjoyable."
Ocelot is also a very good carpenter; this voyeurism is never gratuitous. It is solidly placed in the context of the ongoing narrative, and there is always some juicy story business percolating to keep us interested. The director admits that some of the story, especially the immigrant who cannot see the good aspects of his adopted land, is a personal one. "I have been a stupid immigrant myself," he says, relating his transfer when he was 11 from a small primary school in sunny Africa to a large "factory" school in the gloomy northwest of France. "I hated the place for 10 years," he grimaces. "I did not see the beautiful châteaux or beautiful scenery."
As the film progresses, it is clear that Ocelot intends to show that the "inheritance of this civilization" is mutual across the Mediterranean, but he is cagey enough to put it all in a good fable. "I am here to give you pleasure," he clarifies. "To relax and enjoy the diversity of life. I am talking about pleasure and enjoyment of things."
As with Ocelot's breakout work, the Kirikou films, breasts are shown, so the film has had trouble finding an American distributor. Let us hope that residual Puritanism does not keep millions of people from seeing this beautiful film and its important ideas.
