It’s no secret how much I personally love animated movies. It’s a love that I feared would diminish with age and maturity*, but it has merely grown and refined my appreciation and adoration for the meticulous craft.
In a tremendous effort to compensate for having only one animated feature last year, NZIFF 2014 has stepped up its game incredibly. There’s something in the animation roster for all tastes, so I felt it was my national duty to sum up exactly what those tastes were.
*This is going under the assumption that I have matured, which I have not. Poopy diddle bum bum.
Having previously been gifted with the likes of Ponyo, From Up On Poppy Hill and Arrietty, we’re pretty much guaranteed a Studio Ghibli film in every festival and 2014 will oblige. The Autumn Events treated us to Miyazaki’s gorgeous “farewell masterpiece” The Wind Rises earlier this year, so we should all be grinning like Totoro at the site of another Ghibli film in the schedule – The Tale of the Princess Kaguya from Isao Takahata (responsible for the heart-shredding eye-dribbler Grave of the Fireflies).
Last year gave us the fantastic documentary (that no one talked about) The Persistence of Vision – the animator’s equivalent to Jodorosky’s Dune. Now we’re given The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, an in-depth look at Hayao Miyazaki’s process of creating The Wind Rises, Isao Takahata’s filmmaking methods for The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and the special sauce that makes Studio Ghibli one of the most globally cherished animation studios of all time. I’ll be at the screening, taking down notes/soaking the notepad with my thankful tears.
The annual NZIFF screenings Animation for Kids and Toons for Tots provide the young-uns a whole smorgasbord of A-class silliness (and usually one or two surprisingly profound pieces). That crowd of giggling kids often prove to be one of the liveliest in the festival, but there’s usually the one adult in the back row by themselves laughing louder than everyone else. That person’s me, and I regret nothing.
In feature form, there’s the gorgeous-looking Brazilian film The Boy and the World (my number one pick for this year’s fest). If you want to take a group of kids to experience a world away from the mainstream 3D blockbusters, this beautiful 80-minute piece of moving art is most likely it. Ernest & Celestine (which is now playing in English nationwide) gave us that experience last year, but The Boy and the World comes with the added benefit of being subtitle free, making this an uncomplicated watch for kids of all ages.
I can’t begrudge someone for ‘not getting’ anime. With its emotions that are as exaggerated as the characters’ pupil size, anime shows and features can feel like a whole different world on its own, a world that non-fans sometimes get dragged to by a total-fan during NZIFF. While it may not convert the non-fan, the festival does tend to get a “phoar, that was pretty good” with their anime selection. Despite the Engrish subtitles, South Korean animated feature The King of Pigs was one of the more haunting experiences at NZIFF 2012. This year, we’ve got Patema Inverted, a good-natured sci-fi fantasy adventure that indulges in the awe of gravity manipulation. I’ve seen it, and phoar, it’s pretty good.
There are a small group of cinephiles who are either acceptably uninterested in animated features or like to overtly discard the art-form as “not real cinema” (some of these haters award the god-damn Oscars). But like all bullshitty rules, this group has their exceptions, and these films tend to either be foreign, depressing as all hell or, most likely, both (see: The Illusionist). Fortunately, NZIFF brings the highest order of these outliers, and you can find them this year in Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? from Michel Gondry (Mood Indigo) and The Congress from the director of Waltz with Bachir, another quality ‘I Normally Hate Animation But…’ feature that graced a bygone festival.
NZIFF provides us with weird animated shit in the short film compilation Animation Now. It’s also some of the coolest, showcasing the latest innovations in animated styles and techniques. (One short last year was done entirely on a f&%king pin board!) To get such wonderfully strange animation in a feature format is a real delight – if you’re game – and 2014 grants us the 12-year-in-the-making one-man-made cut-out animated curiosity Consuming Spirits. The last time I took a risk on a similar ‘WTF’ film, I saw A Town Called Panic!. Now I’m happier, more physically attractive and lost 8kgs!
