The Burning Buddha Man
Japanese paper animation? Why not! It’s all that they haven’t done for us recently. And it is absolutely gorgeous too. Of course, the fluidity of movement is sacrificed here, but a very special sense of wonder is also created in the process and another sort of movement is born out of the director’s mastery of the medium and his full dedication to the craft of animation. There’s a challenge at every turn for him in trying to create a story out of stiff papercuts, but despite his precocious age, he passes the test with flying colors, crafting a visually stunning, constantly expressive, often exhilarating action drama from what is essentially a hodgepodge of old and new Japanese mythology. Each handdrawn figure is a work of art in itself, but it is their incongruous combination inside a multi-layered and colorful world of intricate backdrops that is nothing short of miraculous, a stellar example of singularity and artistic integrity in a dreary world of commercialism and the monetization of art.
The story concerns a poor girl's quest to free her parents who have just been murdered while guarding a Buddha shrine against a well-equipped thief, and whose bodies have now merged with the statue through the process of teleportation. She will thus be introduced to a wolf in sheep's clothing in the guise of a local monk who offers shelter at a price. Turns out that this monk is actually the mastermind behind the theft of several Buddha statues and he grows stronger with every new statue he steals, merging with them and drawing power beyond the realm of any human being. In trying to stop him, the girl teams up with the monk's former accomplices, human/statue hybrids hellbent on defeating their old master. But in order to beat the towering, tentacled statue addict, she must first fuse with a Buddha of her own. But is she ready to make that sacrifice?
Stiff papercuts are given endless expressive potential here
Not unlike its protagonists, who eventually fuse with the Buddha statues in order for their spiritual power to unlock, so too does the narrative process from an ungodly merger of wildly eclectic Japanese cultural tropes. The initial tale of stolen Buddha statues, along with its nearly medieval undertones is thus quickly infected with fantasy/sci-fi elements as a scrawny little mutant teleports his way into the original shrine, using organic and technological contraptions to help him rob a towering Buddha statue. The very idea of fusion, both in the sci-fi iteration of the "transformer"-type beast and the interpersonal merger (of the Dragonball warriors for example), is also a typically Japanese trope that infects the whole narrative to create a plethora of unhinged narrative potential. It's a strange mixture of genre, but it works especially fine in the very postmodern context that has allowed and encouraged the return to paper animation as a righteous mode of expression. Hell, there's even some "tentacle porn" elements in there, as well as familiar elements from the family melodrama. The composite narrative does creak a bit in some places, appearing rushed for quick resolutions to increasingly strange problems, but it is not really meant for coherence anyways. It is meant to be equally expressionistic as the medium that supports it. On that level, the film is a total success.
And while every single paper figure (foreground and background) is absolutely breathtaking, paper is not the sole support to be used by the director, who elects to have slimy goop come out of the characters' mouth in the stead of puke and other bodily fluids. There are other materials that are used as well, such as tinted water for blood, tea leaves and such, adding many further textures to an already very sensuous panorama, and engaging the heterogeneous nature of the film further. Actually, while you might first think that paper animation would be restrictive in dramatic terms, the truth is something else entirely. It is actually very expressive and, with the help of the other materials involves, even exhilarating. There's even potential for intricately choreographed fight scenes involving spiritual transformers, horny tentacle beasts and luminous magic nipples. Add some bloodshed in there, as well as a climactic explosion, and it is as if the director hadn't been impaired AT ALL by his medium. Actually, it is him who refuses to impose limits on the potential of his art, like other directors might have done, especially given the width of his project, showing us that anything can be achieved through hard work.
*** Highly expressive and visually striking, this film is proof that creativity and hard work can overcome the biggest of technical challenges.
Thanatomorphose
There were only two things I liked about Thanatomorphose, the two things that turned out to be the heart and soul of this painfully disappointing project. First is David Scherer and Rémy Couture’s stellar makeup work, which vies to create the entire mood, characterization and raison d’être of the narrative, oftentimes challenging Dupuis’s work on The Fly in the process. Second is the courage of all the actors involved, especially lead Kayden Rose. Not that she manages to bring anything really special to her character, but she bravely puts her body on the line, baring it all and subjecting it to a world of imaginary torments. She’s just like Marina De Van, but without her humbling intelligence or impeccable artistic sense. Actually, the whole of Thanatomorphose plays very much like an underdeveloped, soulless version version of De Van’s Dans ma peau. The mise-en-scène is nearly-existant and the much-needed characterization of the protagonist is found cruelly lacking. So what is left is basically the bland exposition of her physical desintegration, which drags on and on until her body is no more and the credits roll.
The story is that of a troubled girl with self-confidence issues. From what we understand, she is a failed sculptor involved in the work-a-day world as an alternative to her shattered dreams. Her only ties to society are a bunch of friends, a lusty pretendant and an abusive boyfriend. Feeling that she holds no interest to the boys in her life as anything other than a dipping bowl, she starts obsessing over yonic symbology (represented by a vagina-shaped hole in her bedroom wall). Then, she literally becomes what she is afraid of being reduced to, namely a piece of meat. Hence, she starts spoiling, like a slab of beef left on the kitchen counter, developing sores, losing fingers and attracting (invisible) flies all the while. This degenerative process goes on and on and on until she has killed both guys responsible for her feelings of inadequacy, then left this earth never to bother us with her existential angst again.
Cool makeup at the forefront, but nothing behind it...
This film was so tedious and barren that I would've simply made it a short and spared spectators its insufferable redundancy. Actually, there's little more in here than seeing the girl rot, which leaves makeup artist Rémy Couture almost squarely in charge of the film's success. Actually, since there is no proper mise-en-scène or screenplay to speak of, this might as well have been a Couture film altogether. The lighting is so bad, and the framing is so poor that every shot seems to have been engineered as a joke or a dare. Or merely as a way to showcase Couture's work from the bleakest, most disgusting way imaginable. Perhaps, THAT was the point of the film: to do the crappiest, most offensively bad film possible. If it was, then cheers to Falardeau, who still has a LONG way to go before become either a legitimate (live action) feature film director or screenwriter.
Obviously, there's a point to be made here about the commidification of people in our hectic world of interpersonal consumption, but the imagery is so crude as to make the entire argument seem blunt and childish. There are about two inserts, which draw the action away from the single locale in which 95% of the narrative was shot. One of them involves a rotting carcass ridden with flies and maggots. Good. Subtle. The other one is more intricate, but equally blunt as an argument to support the film's iffy philosophy. It features a butcher carving pieces out of the protagonist and feeding them to her frenzied boyfriends. Wow! Talk about clever screenwriting! Aside from over-emphasizing its point to the level of saturation, the narrative also manages to be very offensive to us ugly people, who cannot even imagine ourselves as meat. From where I stand, being considered like a piece of meat is actually a luxury that I cannot afford. Girls don't like me neither for my mind, nor for my body. Actually, they don't care for my mind BECAUSE of my body. And that is the real drama. Don't ask me to cry for beautiful people who cannot manage to have agency over their lives because I can't, and I won't. Beautiful people should just SHUT THE FUCK and enjoy their unfair gift because they won't get any sympathy for me. After all, guys are only abusive because girls let them, not because they systematically see girls as objects. And people are only uninterested in one's art because the artist herself isn't, not because they "don't care". Personnally, I felt exhilarated when the protagonist let out her final scream and disappeared into oblivion for I could finally go back to my life and bask in REAL fuckin' pain.
* One whole star for the three stars of this project: Scherer, Couture and Rose. Awesome job, guys!
