In the last post I covered several different untranslated films from around Europe which seemed interesting. In this post I'm going to show you all three animated films which seem interesting. Two of these films are a bit low budget and that is probably the reason for much of their limited frame rate.
First up. An animated film from Brazil called Boi Arua, Direct By Francisco Liberado and written by Alba Liberado and himself. This film is, if the google translated Portuguese language Wikipedia article is accurate, the story of a farmer who tries to kill a wild enchanted ox. The film's style is inspired by woodcuts in a tradition called Cordel Literature of a sort of leaflets hung by twine with poems and pictures printed on them. The film seems incredibly surreal. At the beginning there's characters introduced in superimposed areas of the work but interact with the rest of the screen. There's also people staring at the screen as they shove a hand in the viewer's face like you're really there. I haven't browsed through the whole film so I don't know how much dialogue there is but there's at least a couple paragraph's worth in the beginning.
First up. An animated film from Brazil called Boi Arua, Direct By Francisco Liberado and written by Alba Liberado and himself. This film is, if the google translated Portuguese language Wikipedia article is accurate, the story of a farmer who tries to kill a wild enchanted ox. The film's style is inspired by woodcuts in a tradition called Cordel Literature of a sort of leaflets hung by twine with poems and pictures printed on them. The film seems incredibly surreal. At the beginning there's characters introduced in superimposed areas of the work but interact with the rest of the screen. There's also people staring at the screen as they shove a hand in the viewer's face like you're really there. I haven't browsed through the whole film so I don't know how much dialogue there is but there's at least a couple paragraph's worth in the beginning.
Next is a film from Argentina called The Four Secrets. It was directed and written by Simรณn Feldman and It uses a flat cutout style years before Grendel Grendel Grendel. I can only hope that the plot is as interesting as the visuals once the dialogue gets translated. All I can tell right now is that there's several siblings making up a fantasy that is illustrated by the visuals. I'm surprised to find such an interesting animated film come out of Argentina at such an early date.
Last we have a film from China which is the one I've wanted to see for the longest time. It's called Legend of Sealed Book, or Secrets of the Heavenly Book according to IMDb. It's directed by Shuchen Wang and Yunda Qian and written by Lei Bao and Schuchen Wang. It's very fluidly animated for the most part and considering the interest around Uproar in Heaven and Nezha Conquers the Dragon Kings it's a wonder that nobody I know of has tried to translate it into English.
I hope that you found a film of interest among these three. It seems that there's still some surprises in the world of obscure animated features even after many of the original great films have been discovered. I hope you all found something of interest in this post. I don't know what the next one will be about but it might be another post about animation aesthetics or it might be about storytelling in animation.
