Fresh from the Festivals: February 2009's Reviews
ERGO is the story of two people searching for harmony in entirely different ways. The first moves across a bizarre landscape, creating musical notes and large stone pillars as he walks. The stone pillars are incredibly tall, and dissipate as soon as he breaks contact with them. Across the misty, dingy skyline is another, similar creature, who is also creating music, along with non-dissipating stone pillars that are slowly building an entire new landscape.
The two move inexorably toward each other, each oblivious to the other's world as they create and destroy, following divergent musical paths. When they finally meet, there seems to be potential for a wonderful musical collaboration... but their differences threaten their entire existence.
The film is beautiful, tragic and uplifting, often simultaneously. The character designs are simple, and very relatable, making their problems all the more real, and more upsetting. The bleak palette makes the fleeting moments of optimism in the film all the more poignant, with the complexity of the story pulling you in all the while. Attila Pacsay's music and Imre Madacsi's sounds complement director Géza M. Tóth's visuals perfectly.
ERGO was created using Autodesk's 3ds Max, Adobe After Effects and Steinberg Cubase SX. The filmmakers are probably best known for their 2007 Academy Award-nominated short Maestro, but if they can maintain this level of quality in the future, that's bound to change.
ERGO
The remaining three films this month fall into the "haunting" category. Each one stayed with me for quite some time after my initial viewings, and each for different reasons.
It's not that it's a bad film, by any means. It's a bold film, with solid character designs and a clear artistic vision guiding it. But the film itself -- it's downright eerie, in every single aspect.
Milk Teeth is set out in the country, where the corn's as high as an elephant's eye, and there's no better way to spend an evening than driving around with your best girl in your pickup truck. Banoczki takes this setting and focuses on all of the most unsettling aspects of it. First of all, the action takes place at night, in a poorly-lit cornfield inhabited by nervous, dead-eyed animals. The human characters, a teenage boy, a teenage girl, and her younger brother, are awkward in disturbing ways, from their character designs to the way they move, to their reasons for hanging out in a field in a pickup truck in the middle of the night. Every aspect of the film, including the Jim Jarmusch-esque soundtrack, seems designed to leave the viewer ill at ease.
Banoczki's designs are evocative of German Expressionists, with an emphasis on the more disturbing aspects of their artwork. He accomplished this through cut out animation drawn in Adobe Photoshop, and composited and animated in Adobe After Effects. He doesn't list any specific influences for Milk Teeth, but I'm not sure that I'd want to know about them anyway -- it's hard enough getting scenes from this film out of my head, let alone the original source material.
Milk Teeth
Director Tibor Banoczki's Milk Teeth is a much-lauded film that he created for his M.A. level graduate thesis, and it was by far the most difficult to watch of this month's "FFF" films.
Rosa Rosa is beautifully animated short, and its uplifting story is nearly overshadowed by the incredible visuals employed by director Félix Dufour-Laperrière. He gathered old photographs from the era that he wished to recreate, then animated them using Adobe After Effects. Those still images were mixed, filtered and put in motion. These resultant animation sequences were printed, frame by frame, on paper and then reworked with painted and drawn animation.
Rosa Rosa is scene after scene of amazing visuals, with sketchy, penciled characters moving as specters through a ghostly city as planes soar overhead, reality flickers in and out of existence, and mankind moves on regardless, as it always has, and always will. As with Milk Teeth, the imagery lingers long after the final reel has passed, but unlike that film, Rosa Rosa will leave you with a sense of hope and optimism in the face of adversity. And that's something we can all use right now.
Andrew Farago is the gallery manager and curator of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum and the creator of the weekly online comic serial The Chronicles of William Bazillion.
Rosa Rosa
The final film in this month's "FFF" explores life and love during wartime, as individual and collective fates interweave as Rosa and her lover try to preserve a state of fragile normalcy. Leaders make pronouncements, soldiers follow orders, bombs rain down on an unsuspecting populace, but human nature dictates that life goes on, no matter what. Rosa's plight allows us to see the human side of war and turmoil, and its impact on everyday people.
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