The Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka (with The Emperor's Nightingale)

1951 Czech animation that none of my 4 1/2 readers will care about

Rating: n/r

Plot: Contains five short films and one feature-length film based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

The Emperor's Nightingale, narrated by none other than Boris Karloff, was boring. I watched it last, and maybe by that time, I had had enough of the puppet films of Jiri Trnka, a guy who needs to buy a vowel. The shorts though? Well, it's Czech animation, so it's up one of my favorite alleys. The first, "Bass Cello," is from the same Chekhov story that John Cleese used in Romance with a Double Bass, a cute little skinny-dipping tale. The puppets, like in most of these movies, are simple in a charming way, but Trnka still manages to make the characters expressive. I also like his backgrounds, how he simulates cloud movement and water reflection. With the wizardry of Henry Selick and other modern animators, there's not much in this that's going to drop your jaw, but Trnka's work does show off a technical genius. The wild west romance adventure parody called "Song of the Prairie" used sparse backdrops and more of those expressive but simple puppets for some funny moments. Nice touch with a playing card at the end during the villain's death. "Merry Circus" was more cut-outs than puppet stop-motion, little paper talented seals, mischievous clowns, a monkey, trapeze mayhem, a performing bear, a one-man band, a woman on a horse. Cirque So-Bear! Abbey watched this one with me and really seemed to enjoy it. These are less experimental/surreal than Svankmajer/Barta (although "The Hand" was sort of an existential nightmare), more in the vein of Mr. Roger's puppet friends than copulating animated meat. The weirdest one might have been "A Drop Too Much," a short about drunk-drivin' Bill that was like a creepy public service announcement. Worth watching if you're into this sort of business, but trust me--you don't really need to watch The Emperor's Nightingale no matter how much you like puppets or Boris Karloff. Maybe it needed a puppet Boris Karloff?

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

2005 Quay Brothers fun

Rating: 12/20

Plot: An evil doctor kidnaps an opera diva. He hires the titular piano tuner (of earthquakes) to perfect his seven automatons so that he can stage an opera he wrote for himself featuring the kidnapped opera diva, also turned into an automaton.

Reading a plot like that, you'd think this is awesome! Unfortunately, that's not the case. This movie crawls, moving so slowly that it barely qualifies as a moving picture at times. I've liked the Quay Brothers in the past; their only other full-length Institute Benjamenta is artsy-fartsy fun and you can read a bit about their short puppet/stop-animation films here. This doesn't have nearly enough puppet action. The mini-lumberjack on the poster makes a few short appearances, and the animation for the guy's automatons, when it's shown off, is beautiful. There's also some mysterious backward filming shenanigans where the Quays "animate" some real people. Without a doubt, you get some beautiful imagery in Piano Tuner, but it's all so sluggishly displayed that I wonder if it was made as a cure for insomnia or something. Stilted dialogue doesn't help. Neither does the fact that, especially early in the film, I couldn't really see or hear what the hell was going on. It makes putting the pieces to this little puzzle of a movie especially tiresome, and after a while, my mind dropped out and I just waited for the little doll lumberjack to pop in again. After all, that's why I bothered to watch this in the first place. Speaking of that, this might have the current record for the number of times I started this and had to give up and start again later for whatever reason (general boredom, sleepiness, too much noise in the room). I had it recorded on the t.v. about two years ago and never got through it, and I made at least two other attempts to watch it on Netflix.

Here's a question for my readers, by the way: Have you ever heard a person, during the time preceding sexual intercourse, ever heard your woman (or guy, I suppose) say the words "Take me"? I have my doubts that anybody ever says that, but you hear it in movies all the time. Kiss, kiss kiss, fondle, rub, rub, kiss, nibble, kiss, rub. . ."Take me!"

And now, here's the first ever shane-movies contest! Successful blogs have contests and giveaways, and I sure would like to have a successful blog. So, here it goes: If you can watch The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes uninterrupted, send me video evidence plus letters from at least two eyewitnesses, and I will make you a grotesque puppet out of food. It must be your first attempt to watch the movie, however. Offer not valid in Oklahoma because people from Oklahoma are creepy.

The Illusionist

2010 French cartoon

Rating: 18/20

Plot: The titular magician's getting old, and with the emerging popularity of rock 'n' roll musicians, so is his act involving a squirrely rabbit and various objects stuffed up his sleeve. He travels to Scotland where he befriends a young maid named Alice. She travels with him to England where he struggles with his art and uses his meager funds to buy her shoes and dresses.

Ventriloquist, by the way, is a "belly talker" as ventri means belly and loqu means talk. Latin roots. Engastrimyth is from the Greek and means "stomach talker." I figured you'd find that interesting.

I love Tati, I love French whimsy, I loved Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville, and I was pretty sure I would love this movie. I might not be right about a lot of things, but I was about that. There's a wonderful texture to Chomet's 2D animation. A scene near the end with a shadow makes me tear up just thinking about it, but there are all kinds of tiny details that I just loved in this--the radiance of a jukebox, shadows over golden grasslands, a twist of a coat in front of a mirror, window reflections, the clown nose of the downtrodden. The style and the settings make me nostalgic, and I'm not even sure why. I've never been to Scotland, France, or England. But there's just something about the way the places and backgrounds are drawn. I loved the way this film looked. And like Triplets, I love the way Chomet has his characters move. Again, he exaggerates the grotesqueness of human beings, putting the needle on the old quirk-meter well into red. The hup-hup-hupping acrobats. The melancholy clown (a scene where he listens to calliope music alone in his room is just beautiful). The little fellows who run the hotel. The ventriloquist and his dummy (loved that first appearance of the dummy!). The way the rock band sashays off the stage. They all interact in a nearly dialogue-free little world because words just aren't that necessary. All you need to do is watch a handful of silent films to find that out. This has that silent film funk but with a slightly more complex range of human emotions. Inferences need to be made, and there's definitely some wiggle room here, allowing for a variety of hunches about what's going on with these characters. I'm definitely the type of movie watcher who's moved more by imagery than words, and it's great how Chomet tells so much story without having to explain things with any superfluous language. And then you've got the Tati influence. It's Tati's story, personal and heartbreaking, and this medium is perfect for capturing the Hulot mannerisms, the Tati-type sight gags, and the overall flavor. Chomet does capture Tati's movements very well, from the way he chases after his rabbit to his careful maneuvering over an extension cord. It felt good seeing Tati again even if it was just an animated version of him. Maybe that's where the feelings of nostalgia come from. This might have a little more sentimentality than Tati's live action films, but it's that sentimentality of the aforementioned silents and therefore feels very comfortable to me. Comfortable is a good word for this maybe. The French have this way of making movies that you inhale instead of just watch. They're movies that are like old shoes, and this is a real old shoe of a movie, one that feels like it's just always been there, more beautiful because of its dust and scratches and the fact that it smells just like my old foot.

Alice

1988 animated classic

Rating: 17/20

Plot: See Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

My favorite retelling of Carroll's book, Svankmajer's Alice is, in my opinion, represents the master animator at the peak of his grotesque powers. The story's essentially the same, and most of the characters from the novel find their way into Svankmajer's Wonderland. Svankmajer's vision and leftfield creativity breathes unique life into them, making the White Rabbit a sawdust-leaking stuffed buck-toothed thing, the March Hare a wind-up toy, the Mad Hatter a wooden marionnette, the Caterpillar a sock puppet, and, most disturbingly, Bill and the White Rabbit's other pals a perverse menagerie of skeletal reptilian things. The pace is quick, and there's plenty to see, especially for lovers of quirky nightmares. The narration kind of annoys me, probably more so because of some terrible dubbing, but I can put up with that because it's such a treat visually. I definitely could have done without half the lip close-ups though. Nevertheless, bitchin'!

Little Otik

2000 horror comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Bozena and Karel want a child more than anything else in the world. They receive some upsetting news when a doctor tells them they'll never have a child. To cheer his wife up, Bozena unearths a tree root that's kind of in the shape of a human baby and presents it to his wife. They pretend it's real and play parent at their weekend house, and nine months later, with the aid of some faux stomachs, fool their neighbors and friends into thinking they have had a child. Problems arise when the wooden baby develops an impossible appetite.

This doesn't have as much animation as Jan Svankmajer's Alice or Faust. When you finally get to see the root baby come to life, it's truly horrifying and very realistic. The breast-feeding and temper tantrum scenes manage to be even more terrifying than watching a real-life baby. Otik is based on a Czech folk tale, a story learned when a neighbor girl reads from a picture book, and like the best folk tales, this has its share of gruesome moments. It's particularly gruesome when the titular child eats, of course, but watching the other characters eat isn't much better. And they certainly enjoy an interesting array of soups. But Otik isn't all horror. It's also very humorous. A scene where a guy on the street fishes babies out of a tub with a net and wraps them in newspaper is very funny, and as disturbing as it is, a scene featuring a pedophile's crotch hand made me laugh. That pedophile's crotch is the first animation you see in this movie, by the way. The funniest bit is when the husband brings the root to his wife and says, "Guess what I've got for you." It just seems like such a cruel thing to do to a woman who can't have a child, but I laughed and laughed anyway. I really enjoy this movie, but I wonder if Svankmajer had trouble with funding. There are parts of the movie that seem incomplete, especially the ending, and I really wish there could have been more animation, even if was just surreal vignettes that had nothing to do with the main conflicts. Like crotch hand! I imagine the film's theme has to do with human greed, especially since an alternate title is Greedy Guts.

The Happiness of the Katakuris

2001 black comic musical (with claymation!)

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The titular family lives in the middle of nowhere, operating a bed-and-breakfast that nobody visits because the dad heard that a new road was going to be constructed that would be great for business. The family's far from happy. The son's got a criminal background, and the daughter is recently divorced. But their luck changes when they actually get a customer. Then their luck changes again when the customer commits suicide. They decide to cover it up. Soon, more customers arrive and wind up dead. Apparently, that's a problem. They sing about it!

This one starts with a woman in a restaurant eating soup. She finds a demon thing in the soup ("Waiter, there's a demon in my soup!") and the whole scene morphs into claymation. The demon steals her uvula and flies off. Eventually, a bird gets involved and the grandfather of the family throws some firewood at it from an absurd distance and hits it. Then, we get to meet the Katakuris. I've got no idea what the demon or the woman's uvula had to do with anything. This is the second Takashi Miike movie I've seen in the last couple weeks. He's the type of director who needs to calm down, have somebody gift him a funnel, or hire an assistant to throw cold water in his face every twenty-three minutes or so. This is a wild ride, not really letting up after the scene with the uvula-thieving demon, and the mashing together of genres (the Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead description on the poster is appropriate) is almost unnerving. But in a delightful way! You can go into this movie expecting the unexpected, but Miike will be a step ahead of you. It's like he's discovered the 3-D equivalent to "unexpected," and uses it to attack the viewer as he also assaults with tacky color, gross imagery, gross sound effects, and tacky musical numbers. You know how you sometimes come across a video clip of footage from a Japanese game show and you watch it and think, "Everybody in Japan must be nuts!"? This is the movie equivalent to that. Nothing's right about The Happiness of the Katakuris. It's unapologetically dopey and covered in a few thick and raunchy layers of cheese. The music really is terrible, dated Japanese pop with embarrassingly terrible lyrics. You really have to sort of endure the musically numbers. The onslaught of that with the gross-out imagery and the seemingly random metamorphosis into claymation is enough to make you dizzy. But again, it's in a delightful way! The humor's black, absurdly black, and if you can't laugh at death, this probably isn't the movie for you. As unhinged as this is, it all manages to keep things together for an (expected?) feel-good ending. This definitely isn't for everybody. In fact, it's probably not for very many people at all, but if you think you might be the type of person who would like a movie where one of the first five words in the script is "uvula," you might want to give it a shot.

The Ossuary and Other Tales

Svankmajer shorts from 1964-1988

Rating: n/r

This collection has some great stuff but might not be as consistently great as the other collection. "The Last Trick" features a pair of dueling wooden-headed magicians and their surreal acts. "Don Juan" is marionettes, sometimes sans strings, in elaborate stage settings. "The Garden" has no animation at all; it's an absurdest gag about a fence made out of people. "Historia Naturae" is visually interesting with its rapid shots of the kibbles and bits of eight different species, but after a while, I was glad it was a short short. "Johann Sebastian Bach" is rock music. Well, it's Bach set to images of animated stones. Oft-beautiful, but not exactly memorable. The one in the title ("The Ossuary") isn't a tale at all but a commissioned glimpse at an ossuary in the Czech Republic, a church/mass-grave with art and architecture constructed from tens of thousands skeletons of Black Plague victims. That one is exactly memorable, not because of anything Svank's doing but because it just might be the most beautifully depressing place I've ever seen. Svank doesn't animate (some of those rapid fire shots and weird camera movements are there though), but this place is as Svankmajer as a place can be. I might have liked it more if the female tour guide voice wasn't in it. She's entertaining as she repeatedly begs field-tripping children not to touch the bones and eventually threatens them, but it kind of takes away from the experience a little. "The Otrants Castle" was a dull pseudo-documentary. There's some cut-out animation that isn't very interesting. "Darkness Light Darkness" is an extra on Alice. It's creative, risque, and bizarre fun with clay and is great from a technical standpoint (watching clay hands mold with clay is just cool) and for anybody looking for some avant-garde slapstick. Finally, "Manly Games" is a hilarious look at soccer. You can't accuse Svank of being pretentious after watching that one, a mish-mash of animation styles (some cut-out stuff, some clay) that looks at the sport in a grotesquely humorous way.

I'd say three-and-a-half of these are vital. For fans, the others are worth checking out once.

Toy Story 3

2010 cartoon

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 17/20; Dylan: 15/20; Emma: 20/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: The mouse is getting behind on his payments to keep Walt Disney's head cryogenically frozen, and after a failed attempt at a bakesale--failed because of pre-sale rumors abounding involving Goofy and perverse activity and cupcakes--they decide it's time to wheel out Woody and Buzz and the other toys and make another Toy Story movie. They struggle to find a plot and eventually decide to just redo the one from Toy Story 2 with a few twists and a whole bunch of new characters because then they can make a lot more money with action figures, etc. "Because kids," the mouse said, "will even want toys based on characters who were only in the movie for a few seconds."

Don't get me wrong though. I loved seeing a brand new Toy Story movie, and this has to be considered one of the most successful and maybe even the best trilogy of all time. Most of the success comes from the audience already knowing and loving all these characters. Parents and their children have seen the other two Toy Stories dozens of times, so you go into this third one with Woody, Buzz, et. al. already feeling like you grew up with these toys or that they're your best friends. If they are your best friends, however, you really should go out and meet some actual people. So there's no wasted time or need for a lengthy exposition, and the previously-developed characters just slide right into the newish story. Newish instead of new, by the way, because there are quite a few parallels between this and its predecessor. The story is a little tidier than number two, and the animation is a lot better than either of the others although the toys thankfully haven't been given any kind of technological upgrade to make them look better than the very first installment of their story. But the human characters look a lot better and move a lot more naturally than in the other movies. The parts of Toy Story 3 with humans (good to see Sid again!) really couldn't have been done when the first movie came out. And the atmosphere and backgrounds are also vastly improved, creating a ton more depth than we had the first time we met these guys. When the characters are in peril in this movie, like in a genuinely frightening and intense scene where they are about to die, the background textures add to the mood. Compare that with the most frightening scene in Toy Story when Woody and Buzz are trapped in Sid's scary room, and the atmospheres in this new one blow the old stuff away. There were a lot of allusions to the first two movies, including a lot of repeated lines which sort of annoyed me, and there was also a continuation of the references to the original Star Wars trilogy. I also appreciated the references to prison escape movies with the toys' busting out of a daycare center. There was also something going on in that scene that I couldn't stop laughing at, so much that I really started feeling like a fool after a while. There are a ton of funny moments in this, but there are some pop culture references that seemed a little too easy, and I got to the point where I'd cringe whenever Barbie and Ken were on the screen. With over three hundred characters, including a nod to the wonderful My Neighbor Totoro, the screen is just filled with stuff to look at. It's a feast for the eyes. As a parent, this was a strangely emotional experience for me, but a lot of the tears seemed a little more forced in this one than in other Pixar features like Up. Very good movie, and like most Pixar movies, I look forward to seeing it again.

The Man Who Planted Trees--A Tribute to the Extraordinary Animator Frederic Back

1970-1993

Rating: n/r

Plot: Eight animated shorts by German-Canadian animator Frederic Back.

"The Man Who Planted Trees," as the title might indicate, is the real showcase here. Like about half of these pieces, it's haunting, almost impressionistic animated artistry with muted colors and an emphasis on movement, sometimes abstract movement. Swirling animal morphing. And as with most of Back's work, this has environmental themes. It's a good story, but I probably could have done without Christopher Plummer's narration even though there's really not anything wrong with it. I just think the visuals were good enough to tell the story.

"All Nothing" was nominated for an Oscar, but unlike "The Man Who Planted Trees,' it didn't win. It's a creation story but one where Adam and Eve transform into fish people at one point. It's also got an environmental theme, this time about man's destructive relationship with nature. In a way, this stuff reminds me of Fantasia with the movement perfectly complimenting the music or vice versa.

"Crac," violent industrialization as seen from the perspective of a rocking chair, won an animated short Oscar. The animation here is a little more crude than the last two, but it's effective in telling this beautifully nostalgic and ironically very human story in this short rocking chair biopic.

"The Mighty River," the last film chronologically in this collection, bored me. Like "Crac," it's a biography of a non-human, this time the St. Lawrence River. The animation is beautiful--lots of swimming colors and dancing shapes--but the narration made this like something you'd see at Epcot Center while waiting to do something else that's more fun.

"Inon" and "The Creation of Birds" both have Canadian-Indian motifs and characters and both, as you could probably expect by now, deal with environmental themes. Neither absolutely thrilled me although both were different visually or stylistically than the other stuff in the collection. "Inon" is a really bad day described with abstract imagery, and "Birds," I think, used cut-outs.

"Illusion" was a great story, a tale of a magician/one-man band frolicking into a childlike paradise and transforming all the beauty into modern artificiliaties. Birds and flowers were turned to wind-up toys. Buildings and billboards eventually dominated the landscape. Again, Back's animating that conflict between nature and modernizing man. And like the last short, "Taratata," it also deals with the differences in the minds of children and adults. "Taratata" is a compare-contrast of two parades, the first filled with bombast and giant mechanical floats, one featuring animatronic lumberjacks chopping down endless trees. The second parade is the imagined parade of a group of children, and of course, is more pure and innocent.

Back's animation is great, but I wanted to mention how impressed I was with the music, too. I believe the same guy, Normand Roger, did the music for all but one of these. The versatility alone is impressive as the music goes from orchestral stuff to throat singing accompanied by Jew's harps and everything in between. And more often than not, the music is helping the animated figures move.

Recommended for fans of animation, especially if you're not the type who'll be annoyed by all the hippie environmental stuff.

Wool 100%

2006 Japanese weirdness

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Two sisters live in a cluttered house. They don't do much other than go on daily treks to dig through people's trash in order to add to the clutter. One day, they bring home a musical doll and several balls of red yarn. That night, a girl appears and begins to disrupt their lives, using the yarn to make an oversized sweater before screaming, unraveling, and beginning again. The past starts to bleed into the present.

More evidence that the Japanese are nutty. This is a movie with a different tone, a pace that would likely frustrate Westerners, and a surprising bit of mindblowing visual flair in the middle. The latter, a startling animated sequence, is too good for words and such a contrast to the subdued tone of everything that sets it up. It's brilliant. Minutes later, the audience is treated to a kind of low budget puppet show, tiny hands manipulating wooden dolls in a doll house. There's a wonderful simplicity to the whole thing. I do think this movie has some problems when it attempts to get a narrative going. But the characters are intriguing. The setting, before they de-clutter anyway, is one of those that gives your eyes a reason to wander over every inch of the screen. And the quirkiness is refreshingly original. This is not for many, but a handful of freak magnets will find this rewarding.