Fresh from the Festivals: October 2005’s Reviews
Jona/Tomberry The story, as it were, is a Matrix-y pastiche of through-the-looking-glass shenanigans where there's a colorful world here and a monochrome world there, and on the monochrome side an anonymous prole with frizzy hair is given a vision of a wildly scraggy mountain peak into which he is dropped, hovering just feet above a twitching baby with a human torso and a mermaid's tail. The man's guide and the producer of this virtual reality event is an angular-faced S.S.-type who gives the prole a gun and insists he shoot the infant — it's only an illusion, after all. He refuses.
Surrounding the mountain peak is a forest of mysterious creatures, and one of them sneaks up on the pair of men, snatching away the infant. It's a walking tree with a bird's nose and a nervous darting head, and she takes the baby down through the forest to the sea, where she and the baby disappear beneath the surface. Things quickly go wrong, and the mirror in which the prole has been viewing all these illusions explodes, spiking one eye with a shard of glass and sending him and the contents of his room flying backwards — and, surprisingly, up towards the ceiling, where the gravity has suddenly relocated.
The producer rushes in; a bunch of miniature versions of himself scramble blindfolded at his feet; there's a whale trapped in a glass ball; the baby sings a song about not being scared; the whale escapes the bowl and appears in the baby's arms; and the producer starts throwing his little ones into the mirror one at a time to "go in there and bring back pop's fish".
Title cards that read "Based on the Graphic Novel" are never a good sign. It's a genre where the Graphic too often outweighs the Novel, and you get a fantastic and vivid world peopled with ciphers who have really good tailors. And Jona/Tomberry isn't just based on the graphic novel — it's based on the graphic novel based on the song. The auteur in question, Rosto, has a band called the Wreckers who do some pretty bitchin' riffs, and the animation was retrofitted to match what he later decided his songs were actually about.
Naturally there's a lot of shouting "No" and "Are - you - fucking - me?" and cryptic declarations about the nature of reality; meanwhile there's a deficit of recognizable human behavior that could convince us this is how real people would react under these extraordinary circumstances.
Director Rosto and the Rocketta Film studio have thrown a simply huge amount of money and talent into this short, and it looks breathtaking. The sound is wonderful and demands headphones; the collection of noises to be heard as the content of the man's room fall up to the ceiling is terrifyingly convincing. Even the DVD screener came with a 32-page full-color glossy booklet with pictures and explanations. Sadly the short, which is the reason there is a booklet, doesn't feel the need to explain itself. Then again, a subconscious experience probably never should.
Films with no story can be fine, too — I just saw a lovely and completely wordless abstract short called Fade into White by Kazuhiro Goshima with no pretensions to explanation whatsoever — but Jona/Tomberry clearly wants to evoke that familiar horror and pity that real drama provides. That isn't here, probably because the piece by itself isn't reasonably self-evident in its execution (hence the explanatory booklet). Still, with the right substances and the right amplifier, Jona/Tomberry could fuckin' rock. Watch it before bed.
Jona/Tomberry is exquisitely beautiful to look at. So is a fire, but that doesn't mean there's any drama in it. And there isn't any in Jona/Tomberry, either; but as a brief, vague, and tempestuous nightmare it delivers the goods — and the Rammstein-esque soundtrack doesn't hurt at all.
Overtime The short opens in darkness, into which rises the sound of a tragic orchestral lament, a doleful tune of mid-20th century vintage that provides the only soundtrack to this word-free piece. A simple cloth puppet with an ovoid head and two white, pupil-less eyes appears under a spotlight with a trumpet to play an elegy. Then out of the darkness a man at a workbench appears, dead face-down on the countertop. A group of his puppets surround his body and, not suspecting a thing, carry him to bed. There are about 60 of them, it appears, all of whom gather about him to supervise his rest.
The next morning the house is abuzz with glee and manic energy. The puppeteer can't shave himself for some reason, so a handful of puppets do it for him, while a dozen more wearing striped bathing suits toss an inflatable ball and make for the beach. Then everyone adjourns to the living room for story time, as puppets do acrobatics, tickle the marimba, throw paper airplanes, and play Boy Scout.
In the screening room the puppets don 3D glasses and run old home movies, with the puppeteer propped up in the seat of honor. Then it's time to make dinner, as the cloth creatures don flamboyant chef's hats and do little dance routines shaking spoons like maracas. The dinner is a riot of thrown food, and one errant potato strikes the puppeteer in the head, making him face-plant his soup. Watching him as he refuses to budge, the other shoe drops at last, and the assembled group bow their heads in sorrow. They put him in his best suit and, joining him in one last waltzing swoop by puppeteering the puppeteer with sticks attached to his arms, they lay him down and close his eyes.
Far too much juicy action transpires in this short for the eye ever to catch in real time, so never mind our 30-second clip — flip over to a search engine and look up Overtime together with "Supinfocom" until you find a QuickTime movie of the whole thing, which escaped to the net in 2004.
It's a rare piece of computer animation that can fool the viewer for more than a few seconds into thinking a thing was photographed. Director/animators Oury Atlan, Thibaut Berland and Damien Ferrié get their movements so fiendishly smooth and naturalistic that Overtime sustains that illusion for most of its five-minute running time. There's particulate matter in the air, pools of light eroticizing every surface, and a deep-focus cinematography that wouldn't embarrass itself on a double-bill with Citizen Kane. But most of all it's the depth and breadth of the characters, the liveliness that's been stuffed into every puppet on the screen, that drives the comedy and tragedy.
There's no string of triangles around the puppets' necks, nor are there plus-sign pupils in those eyes, but there's a good helping of Kermit the Frog in all these merry creatures — not just in their appearance but in the bouncy joie de vivre we all adored on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Wisely, the directors have not designed their dead puppeteer to resemble Jim Henson — the bald, imposing corpse in Overtime looks more like an elderly Patrick Stewart. The tribute can lay at Henson's feet, or you can transfer it to any artist who brought life to inanimate objects — the choice is yours.
Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. Somewhere in the world on October 21, 2005, a boy named David Kim was born, and in 18 years he'll find this paragraph while doing an Internet search on his own name and it'll really blow his mind.
Supinfocom is a secondary school for denizens of the French TV and film industry, with courses open to professionals or students with two years of experience or study under their belt. The degree program takes three years, and in the last year three students team up to create a short subject for their thesis. In 2004 the Arles branch of the school spawned an alternately melancholy and goofy tribute to a dead puppeteer, the sublime black and white masterpiece Overtime.
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