The Suspect. © Zeppelin Filmes.320x240 | 160x120

The Suspect
It is relatively rare that a 25-minute animation keeps my eyes glued to the screen these days, but The Suspect did exactly that. In my opinion, it provides a great example of 3D animation; I think it comes close to the quality of an Aardman work, though The Suspect employs puppets rather than plasticine figures. It is obvious that every aspect of the film was crafted with care, from the stylized background and character designs, to the cinematic editing and use of sound and effects, such as a wisp of smoke and light falling across the set. Ruffling newspapers and a fancy penknife that flies through space are among the effects that create a very entertaining puppet film.

The story involves four quite different characters who find themselves together in a train compartment. An older man, reading the newspaper, comes across information about a mysterious railway killer. After a chubby middle-aged lady and a svelte young woman enter the compartment, a rough-looking man takes a seat. As the foursome travel across a stretch of tracks, the man becomes ever more suspicious that the younger fellow is in fact the wanted killer. Deliberately slow pacing, with a lot of attention given to the movements of each model, allow us to sense the personalities of each character. Largely silent, they often regard each other with telling eye movements. It is perhaps the way the eyes move, plus some other aspects of the film (such as the character design of the older female character), that prompt the comparison with Aardman's work.

Director Jose Miguel Ribeiro, together with Luis Da Matta Almeida, developed the idea for the film and began to write its screenplay in 1995. Over a two-year period, they finished the script and began development of their independent puppet animation studio, Zepplin Films, which opened in September 1997. Voices were recorded in June of the following year, and shooting and post-production ran September 1998 through November 1999. Although the film seems perfect to me at its present length, a fifteen-minute version is being edited for use in theaters. The film's dialogue is Portuguese, but the version I saw has English subtitles (unfortunately, white ones, so not all could be read -- still, the visuals tell the story clearly, so that was not a major problem for me).