Escapes its Poo-Faced Limits

Rating: Null/10 (15 August 2010)

Gosh, another Australian project that knows what it is and successfully escapes itself.
The story is about a girl with structural limits: appearance, family, attitude.
The media is stop motion, which brings its own structural limits. These are severe limits, because they straddle what we know as real and what we accept as fantasy. How to work with this? The choices a filmmaker makes in this medium are fascinating.
Jan Svankmajer presents the result as moving museum art, dynamic dioramas. He can be too precious in that Eastern European way that produces needlework that frightens.
Tim Burton, and Henry Selick ("Coraline," "James and the Giant Peach") pretend we are looking at illustrated books the way a child would.
Nick Park treats the medium the way Walt Disney would, as a simple extrapolation from Donald Duck via way of Pixar.
These guys decide not to tackle the simple fact that it is near impossible to elicit real emotion via this form.
Only the Quay Brothers and Christiane Cegavske ("Blood Tea and Red String") make the commitment to create worlds by allowing the characters to inhabit them in a way that inhabitants are worldcreators. They affect a bizarre Victorian metaphors but this is because Lewis Carroll is the genius of this technique and not because the era has any intrinsic advantage. There are powerful and worldchanging moments in these works. But the viewer is asked to make a commitment that few will.
All lucid stop-motion filmmakers face this set of decisions about how to overcome the limits of the medium. If you are writing a story while struggling with this, what is foremost in your mind? Especially if you are Australian, is a society that for some reason is introspective in art? You will produce a "folded" story: one where the subject of the story reflects the form of the story.
We have a girl in Australia who is obsessed with a successful TeeVee show, also stop motion. It is her fantasy world, the movie within the movie. She faces many challenges in simply surviving. She has a pen pal, and successfully writes her way out her limits, first by writing a book about her viewer's physiological limits. (More about this in a minute.) And then by getting a genuine expression of emotion from him in the form of a complete set of figures from the inner film. She triumphs, has child (all this is pretty overt folding) and finally visits the world of her pen pal to discover that she not only affected him, but was effectively his whole emotional life. The medium is mastered.
The two actors chosen are among our very few who understand folded characterization.
This half of the project is fascinating in the normal way that these nested, introspective things are, and is worthwhile. But it is the other half that is amazing.
Mary is our filmmaker, and Max our viewer. Us.
Half of the problem a filmmaker faces is the limits of her medium, and the other half the limits of the viewer. Most of us are emotional cripples, not inclined to work with an artist in a contract of world-building. We are afraid. Max is a citizen of the most urban and sophisticated city on the planet (in contrast to Mary's remote outpost). But he has Asberger Syndrome and is incapable of reading and processing emotion.
This characterizes us viewers pretty well; our movie experiences are often exercises in avoiding truth. I found it rare and thrilling to see it explicit in this nested work, which is superficially sweet but essentially damning.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.