Animafest Zagreb 2023 has unveiled the selections for its Grand Competition Feature Film — a thematically and stylistically diverse array, selected by artistic director Daniel Šuljić. The central screenings will take place in the open air of the Tuškanac Summer Stage. The Croatian animation gathering will be held June 5-10 (animafest.hr).
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Pierre Földes, a French-American composer, painter and director of Hungarian origin, is an adaptation of six stories by Haruki Murakami with an episodic, framed structure.
The plot begins in Tokyo where, after a major earthquake (psychological rupture), a bank clerk Komura is abandoned by his news-stricken wife Kyoko, a focally relatively suppressed character whose visions give the film its title. Komura is further threatened with termination of employment, and his cat disappears, so he travels to Hokkaido to deliver a package of unknown contents. His colleague Katagiri, on the other hand, finds a large frog in the apartment which, quoting classics, asks for the clerk’s help in saving the city from a giant worm.
3D motion capture of real actors is inserted into a 2D film of subdued colors with an airy, ephemeral background.
Signe Baumane presents her second feature-length work, My Love Affair with Marriage, a partly autobiographical, feminist-satirical musical about the maturation of the Latvian artist Zelma through two marriages and social systems and multiple partnerships. From Sakhalin and Riga, through Moscow to Toronto, we follow the story of love and patriarchy, peer, marital and institutional violence, sex and gender, identity and conventions, pressures and conformity, ideology and individualism.
Sketchy, slightly caricature 2D characters (pencil on paper) move against detailed stop-motion 3D backgrounds made of papier-mâché, as seen in the author’s successful debut feature Rocks in My Pockets (2014) is here complemented by educational segments in which a personified brain cell explains the biochemical processes of the heroine’s emotional reactions. The animation of these segments was created by Yajun Shi, while Baumane herself devoted seven years to studying neurology, biology and anthropology to craft a playful scientific counterpoint to her ironic and political deconstruction of romantic myths.
The main voice role is performed by the Polish-American actress Dagmara Domińczyk (Succession), while the 24 songs featured in the film were composed by Kristian Sensini.
White Plastic Sky, from directors Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó, is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction film with a strong environmental subtext.
In the year 2123, Budapest is the last surviving Hungarian city thanks to its dome and a social contract in which people hand over their bodies to the Plantation on their 50th birthday where they are gradually transformed into trees with edible leaves. Nora, the 32-year-old wife of psychiatrist Stefan, cannot accept her son’s death, so she voluntarily surrenders herself to the Plantation, from which Stefan will try to save her.
With the help of geologists, meteorologists and botanists, the directors wrote, drew and, over the course of seven years, made the film in a combined technique of computer 3D animation and classic manual rotoscopy. Its 3D animation enabled expansive world-building of its metropolis where social realism abuts cyberpunk influences.
Spanish comic artist and animator Alberto Vázquez continues his run of compelling short films and features screening at Animafest — from Birdboy and Birdboy and the Forgotten Children to Unicorn Blood, Decorado and Homeless Home — with his black comedy anti-militarism trip Unicorn Wars.
The teddy bears have been locked for years in an ancestral war against their sworn enemy, the unicorns, with the promise that victory will complete the prophecy and usher in a new era. Aggressive, confident teddy bear Bluet and his sensitive, withdrawn brother Tubby could not be more different. As the rigors and humiliation of teddy bear bootcamp turn to the psychedelic horrors of a combat tour in the Magic Forest, their complicated history and increasingly strained relationship will come to determine the fate of the entire war.
The darker corners of Japanese anime are represented by the world premiere of the psychological body horror Feast of Amrita by indie auteur Saku Sakamoto, whose feature-length debut Aragne: Sign of Vermillion screened at Animafest in 2019.
Feast of Amrita takes place before Sign of Vermillion, so fans will find it particularly interesting to follow the experiences of high school girls Tamahi, Aki and Yu (with notable Japanese names Maaya Uchida and Kana Hanazawa among the voice talents) in an already familiar apartment complex where time and space are bent into a monstrous parallel reality under the influence of an obscure scientific experiment.
As in his previous film, Sakamoto uses hints of a hand-held camera to convey uncertainty and anxiety, mixing in idiosyncratic computer animation of the backgrounds and lens flare lighting.
The Chinese film No Changes Have Taken in Our Life by director Jingwei Xu is about a sousaphone player named Ba, who returns to his hometown with the instrument ‘wrapped around his body’ after his studies — a story inspired by the filmmaker’s childhood in a sleepy, provincial industrial hub. The juxtaposition of the hero’s interests and goals with the prosaic life in an unemotional and alienated tone forms a foundation for the story, in which the dreams of an artist in search of work collide with the dullness of his environment and its inhabitants, while his unusual instrument in this dreary setting adds a note of absurdity.
No Changes Have Taken in Our Life makes use of interesting framing, cuts and mise-en-scène, brough to life in 2D animation that contrasts ungainly characters on beautifully drawn backgrounds.
