For this week's Hidden Treasures article, I'm featuring three animated films, whose fame is far lower than even the most unsuccessful American animations of the past few years, but whose quality is far higher. Make sure you catch at least one of these films - what's the use in me writing this if I'm not inspiring at least one reader to seek out a lesser-known gem such as these.
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988) - ISAO TAKAHATA
Only in Japan, where animation has been a staple of the entertainment industry for decades, has the full range of its potential been exploited. It's a senseless notion that cartoons are for kids - the idea that adults require the depth and realism of live action is only valid if they are intellectually incapable of responding to animated images, and are thus of lower intelligence than children. Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies is an animated film because it just is - no doubt it was feasible to make it as a live action film, but Takahata's control over the quality of the product may have been compromised by poor acting or production values. As hand-drawn by Studio Ghibli artists, and under the gaze of Takahata, whose appreciation of colour and light, and mood and tone, is unrivalled in his field, Grave of the Fireflies is as beautiful, evocative and moving as it should be. And this is where the range of animation is truly tested, in the fact that this is not just a war film, but it's a genuinely harrowing war film, one which takes no easy routes out to Disneyland Japan when danger and pain come calling - it surrenders, and allows its hopeful story to meet appropriately hopeless conclusions. Aside from being rich in both aesthetic and emotional contents, Grave of the Fireflies is a bona fide gut-wrenching experience. It's one of the best films I've seen.
Click the cut for two more animated classics!
This is the great Lynn Redgrave's final film, so fans of Redgrave should make this a must-see, if they aren't way ahead of me already. An elderly man rescues a charismatic German Shepherd, and forms with it one of those curious bonds between animals of different species, not 'regarding each other across a void of mutual incomprehension,' but crossing that void somewhat, and even growing to love one another. Love may mean a different thing for different folks, but for J.R. Ackerley and his dog Tulip, their relationship was as close as that of any two family members, cherishing those things for which they cared in the other, and abiding by those for which they did not. Stories about humans and their beloved woofies always end the same way, right? The dog dies and everybody's sad. Yeh, including me, I nearly shat myself trying to stifle back the tears in Marley & Me fs, but Paul and Sandra Fierlinger are respectful of the character of Ackerley's writing, and the disarming realism and even explicitness therein, and don't intrude with any irksome strokes of sentimentality. Why should we need the point reinforced? Death, loss, they speak for themselves, and we can all understand to some extent the consequences they have. And what's the point in trying to make an Alsatian cute anyway? For me, at least, Tulip is a dog, and that's cute enough to start with. A quirky, oddly affecting film, which, like Grave of the Fireflies, is specifically tailored for audiences of all ages, particularly intelligent adults.
A TOWN CALLED PANIC (PANIQUE AU VILLAGE) (2009) - STEPHANE AUBIER AND VINCENT PATAR
Now this is different. Surreal is not the word. Daffy is the word. A Town Called Panic will be a bloody brain-fuck if you're not this way inclined, and a bloody comic masterpiece if you are. The toy figurine characters' unchangeably deadpan expressions, the scruffy but inventive art direction, the total and relentless mania of the whole enterprise, it's a damn stupid film, and brilliantly so. To describe its plot would be pointless, as it doesn't have one, I suppose, at least not as a 'regular' film has a plot. It has a series of daft occurrences strung together into a plot, a plot that locates only the most preposterous trail through this stop-motion universe to its eventual end. The joke is that the lead characters (it's actually funny to so much as consider them 'characters') seem to think that they're involved in something of exceptional weight, and Cowboy, Horse and Indian's enthusiasm in their wacky quest to find the Atlanteans who have stolen the walls to their house, no less, is just one of countless inspired touches in A Town Called Panic's screenplay. It's pretty much 75 minutes of the same thing, so if you're unamused after the first five minutes, don't bother, and this isn't quite the kind of humour you can easily grow to appreciate - you either get it or you don't. But, if you do, there's utterly nothing else out there on quite the same wavelength as this film, nor quite the same frequency. It's a singular, superb piece of French comedy, and unforgettably mad.
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