Lamb (2021)

It was last year’s film festival circuit that really delivered the most interesting subject matter for this series, and I always like finding stuff outside traditional genres and styles. Reading some of the brief reviews of the Icelandic film Lamb, directed and co-written by Valdimar Jóhannson (the other writer is frequent Bjork collaborator Sjón) really made me wonder what kind of tone to expect here—after my viewing, I’m not really sure why it’s classified as a “horror” movie in some circles, because it’s a pretty straight drama, a melancholy fairy tale with a fantastical elevator pitch. But, at least to me, the type of weird that one would expect hearing that elevator pitch (“what if a couple adopted a lamb with a human body as their own child”) is not the weird that the movie is trying to deliver. It is a story based in folk tale or dream logic, but that’s often tempered by down-to-earth performances and a deliberate pacing that never stoops to predictability, but also rarely attempts to shock. Once the fantasy of the movie settles in, you can really focus on the emotional lives of the characters, with all the joys and anxieties that come from being given an unusual, and probably accidental, gift from the universe.

Monster Multimedia: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

Netflix has been funding plenty of original animation in recent years, and statistically there was always a decent chance at least some of it would be creature-based, or at least creature adjacent, and so would attract my attention (and there may be enough of it for multiple blog posts, hint hint.) Last year saw the release of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, a thirty episode series split into three “seasons” over the course of ten months, which was produced by Dreamworks’ television animation division with the actual animation provided by South Korea’s Studio Mir (which previously animated shows like Legend of Korra and Netflix’s Voltron reboot), and this is about as creature-centric as it gets, providing a post-collapse sci-fi world filled with unique specimens, rendered in some of the most eye-catching colours I’ve seen in a recent animated thing (it’s based on a webcomic made by series creator Radford Sechrist, an animation veteran, and admirably captures his comics’ colour palette and angular design sense.) Kipo has the serialized plot and gradual worldbuilding of much recent genre work (especially aimed at adolescent audiences), but its emphasis on action and its regular introduction of wacky new ideas and characters throughout give it a feel not dissimilar to the Saturday morning cartoons I used to watch as a kid, only much better in execution. But while it has a focus on excitement and humour, it becomes surprisingly nuanced as it goes along, not afraid to depict its characters’ legitimate struggles with morality and cooperation, while never giving up on their initial optimism and drive. It’s compelling as both a story and candy-coloured blast of imagination, which is still feels like a rare accomplishment.

(I don’t usually signal this, but since this show is still relatively recent and some people may still want to watch it, I’ll note that this post contains heavy spoilers for the entire series, so proceed with caution!)

Yamasong: March of the Hollows (2017)

Continuing on with our Tubi run, and if I end up being the Internet’s top source for reviews of independent puppet-based fantasy films, it is an honour I must humbly accept.

While Blood Tea and Red String, which I wrote about back in February (remember February? ‘Cause I don’t), was entirely stop-motion, Yamasong is mostly traditional puppetry, with movement that at times resembles a modernized version of the “supermarionation” of Gerry Anderson TV shows like Thunderbirds, mixing things up with computer effects (and a bit of stop motion.) You don’t see a whole lot of movies made in this way, by which I mean I have never seen a movie made in this way, so this is new and exciting for me. Like I probably said in my Blood Tea piece, there’s tactile nature of puppets gives the imaginative characters in a fantasy story a feel that can’t be replicated with any other medium, and even if they move in a way that doesn’t read as “natural”, it just makes the world seem all that much more removed from our own. That’s very true of this movie’s combination of puppetry and digital effects, giving all its characters a very unique and designed look (clearly meant to invoke an “eastern” aesthetic, which is complemented by Shoji Kameda’s score, which uses both traditional instruments and Tuvan throat singing), and making its world very dream-like in the way it embraces artifice—it also feels very appropriate in a story where about half the characters actually are artificial.

Blood Tea And Red String (2006)

Here’s something a little different: Blood Tea and Red String is an independently-made stop-motion animated film created by Christiane Cegavske over thirteen years (because making stop-motion by yourself is a long, laborious process), which by itself is an impressive feat. The film, hand-crafted over a period where professional-level filmmaking tools were not available to most, carries many of the purely tactile elements that give stop-motion a unique appeal: even if the things on screen don’t move like real things, they are, in fact, real objects, with a texture that is difficult to replicate digitally. The uncanny realm between the reality of the components and the unreality of its movement plays right into the surreal, dream-like fantasy of Blood Tea (which was clearly inspired by the stop-motion work of Jan Svankmajer), which presents a humanity-free world of inscrutable creatures, with no dialogue, but plenty of symbolism.