"Fantastic Planet"
(France/Czechoslovakia, 1973)
directed by René Laloux, based on the novel "Oms en Série" by Stefan Wul
Visuals/design of“Fantastic Planet” are created by French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker Roland Topor(1938 –1997). As soon as he was also a co-sriptwriter – I guess he enriched the script with fantastic landscapes and creatures that are very typical to Topor’s Surrealistic world of his graphic artworks and fits so well to science fiction genre because of a lot of space for fantasy and imagination.
+ nice blog about Topor with many pictures (in French):
“Fantastic Planet” is made in cutout technique (cutout animation is a type of stop-motion animation produced by moving 2-dimensional pieces of material such as paper or cloth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation). I assume that drawings are made with ink pen and coloured with watercolours or coloured pencils as most of the Topor’s pieces and with very typical crosshatching that compose the form of his fantastic objects.
"The technique itself is fascinating," wrote The New York Times. "Instead of using the traditional method of drawing on acetate, the ingenious producers have sketched on cut-out and hinged paper. This comparative stiffness of movement, instead of the usual animated flash, gives a dignity and eerie depth to an adaptation by directors René Laloux and Roland Topor of Stefan Wul's novel, 'Oms en série.' The story itself is a sci-fi honey."
Film "Fantastic Planet" visuals craetes atmosphere that also reminds Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico deserted landscapes.
+ I foun also another one interesting opinion about "Fantastic Planet" visuals by Chris Justice:
"Finally, the animation techniques used in Fantastic Planet are vital in understanding the evolution of global animation trends. The film exemplifies Laloux’s radical theory that extensive movement and character development do not necessarily coincide with metaphorical graphics in animation. While believing that the latter approach was more purely European and the former more American, Laloux was adept in Fantastic Planet at drawing the line between these two competing schools. Throughout, his graphics often resemble Renaissance or medieval gallery paintings. The compositions are often fixed and static, and movement within each frame is minimal at best. The compositions rely primarily on limited foregrounds, juxtaposed against middle grounds with limited action, coupled with backgrounds that contain minimalistic expressionist objects, figures and images. Graphics abound in symbolic imagery, and it is difficult to watch any scene without being aware of its symbolic and metaphorical potential. Historical and political allegories and not characters drive the movie. As the film unfolds, viewers are drawn more to the situations the characters find themselves in than the characters themselves. The film is filled with paper cutout images animated like hand puppets; the hand that eventually kills the mother Om early in the film is a good example. This style has often been associated with Terry Gilliam's comical Monty Python animations and creates an almost geometric, and therefore rigidly defined, sense of space, unlike the fluid watercolour-like designs of Disney."
Time in “Waltz with Bashir” could be divided in four groups. I will call these groups – layers, who form the whole time of film.
First layer: Year 2006 main character Ari Folman meets his friend from army service period, in a bar and understands he doesn't remember anything from the 1982 Lebanon War. Here is the point where the action begins. Trying to regain his memory, Ari visits several fellows troopers, psychologists and journalist connected with the war. It's not defined how long did the research last, but I presume it was half of the year. One of the first friends Ari Folman visits is Carmi Cna'an, a war-veteran who now lives in the Netherlands. It's winter when the first visit takes place and a summer time when they meet again and Folman remembers the massacre.
Second layer I call time of 1982 Lebanon War. Though the pictures of war are memories, I consider them to be real reflection of 1982 events in Lebanon. Here is the timeline what actually happened during that war:
Third layer is just few episodes in the film, although I think it is important. I call it the time of dreams. To be more precise, it's the surreal dreams of main character. Most of these dreams are closely related with the memories of the war, just they have no certain time. For example dream of getting out of the sea or swimming on the giant naked woman are never defined in the film, but they depict change of the character.
Fourth layer, that makes the general time of the film, is documentary footage. Video represents the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, September 1982 by the Lebanese Forces militia group. This footage is disgusting and outrageous, showing a screaming woman. She shouts "My son, my son" in Arabic, but her words are not subtitled, like it's not irrelevant. This real time footage provoke lots of discussion about depiction of Palestinians in “Waltz with Bashir”. Naira Antoun claims that “they have no names, they don't speak, they are anonymous.” and ”being blown to pieces or lying dead”.
Generally, time in “Waltz with Bashir” is a mosaic of real and unreal, datable and unnameable. Like the genre of the film is contrasting – animation – the soil for illustrating surreal and imaginable things and documentary – pure life.
And from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir
Plot summary
In 1982, Ari Folman was a 19-year-old infantry soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2006, he meets with a friend from his army service period, who tells him of the nightmares connected to his experiences from the Lebanon War. Folman is surprised to find that he does not remember a thing from that period. Later that night he has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the reality of which he is unable to tell. In his memory, he and his soldier friends are bathing at night by the seaside in Beirut under the light of flares descending over the city. Folman rushes off to meet another friend from his army service, who advises him to discuss it with other people who were in Beirut at the same time in order to understand what happened there and to revive his own memories. Folman converses with friends, a psychologist and the reporter Ron Ben-Yishai who was in Beirut at the time.
The film ends with animation transitioning to actual footage of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari Folman about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there’s a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. Ari is surprised that he can’t remember a thing anymore about that period of his life.
Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself. As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images …
Boaz Rein Buskila:
Not your quintessential accountant, yet his work is his entire world. Therefore, it was obvious the dream about the dogs coming to kill him had to take place right outside the accounting firm in which he is junior partner. Boaz’s request that Ari help him find a solution to his nightmare is a standard pattern in their relationship, a pattern that has been recurring for at least thirty years, as if, according to Boaz’s fixed perception, individuals whose business is fantasy are closer to the real world than those whose business is mathematics. Boaz’s obsession with his dreams and his past is very similar to his obsession with mathematics, statistics, numbers of all types and all things that have one absolute truth and which are devoid of various hues. It is for that same reason, that one absolute image a person of his stature should have of himself, that Boaz refused to be exposed in the film and his story is dubbed by a professional actor. Boaz’s face in the film is a fiction of directing. In fact, Boaz’s addictions are one of the reasons Ari developed the extremely unique format of the film “Waltz with Bashir”.
Ori Sivan:
Undoubtedly Ari’s best friend and the person most close to him after his immediate family. Since their mutual adolescence in Haifa, Ori is Ari’s personal shrink, what one might call a ready made therapist, always available for problems pertaining to love, friendship, trauma and repressions of any kind. This despite the fact that during the day Ori is a highly regarded director of films and TV series in Israel. This friendship that erupted at the age of 13 took an interesting turn when they went to film school together at the Tel Aviv University and jointly directed their first two films “Comfortably Numb” and “Saint Clara”. They collaborate to this day on TV drama series, one of which, “In Treatment”, became a reputable remake on America’s HBO network. Easily evident in “Waltz with Bashir” is the fact that Ori took the term family to the extreme and he is raising five children in a remote settlement in Israel’s western Negev desert.
Carmi Cna'an:
Were Ari and Carmi really closer when they were teenagers as opposed to their current relationship now that they’re in their mid fourties? Were they as cold to each other as detached as they appear in "Waltz With Bashir"? Good question. It is doubtful the double encounter in the film can provide an answer. Sometimes separation of twenty years or more dulls a friendship and is liable to blur all the events that occurred to them when they were youths. Carmi went far. He was a genius student in school, a sure bet to succeed in any path he would choose, especially sciences. He chose the new age option, long before anyone knew it as new age. When you think about it today, it is plain to see that in the mid eighties, Carmi was a pioneer. Enraged, he left everything behind and settled in an ashram in India for many years. He perfected and internalized the so called "light buddhism" that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a famous guru in the city of Pune, orchestrated for the capitalistic western world, and introduced Central Europe to the gospel from India. What today seems like an obvious path for young Israelis after their military service was at the time considered “committing suicide” and Carmi paid for it in the form of a many year break from his family in Israel. But in recent years Carmi has found a renewed interest in all that he abandoned twenty years before. A Dutch wife and three children have kept him far from the country where he was born and perhaps as a result the renewed encounter with Ari caused him discomfort and unease. At the last moment, two days before the first day of filming, Carmi refused to reveal his face in the film and his story is dubbed by a professional actor.
Roni Dayag:
Once, forty years ago to this day, when eight contenders ventured out on their own in small sailboats in a merciless race to circle the world, "The Golden Globe", they were examined by a renowned psychiatrist before and after the race. The psychiatrist used the contradicting term ‘disturbingly normal’ to diagnose the winner of the race, Robin Knox. Johnston, who alone for a year in an eight meter boat no sturdier that a nutshell endured terrifying storms, constant fear of death and schools of sharks hungry for prey. Never the less, Johnston was found so normal and devoid of trauma that he made the psychiatrist who diagnosed him totally lose faith in the profession in which he was considered a genius. Ronny Dayag’s initial reaction upon meeting the researcher of the film “Waltz with Bashir” for a preliminary interview was: “I’ve been waiting for this phone call for twenty two years, for someone to come and record my story”. In every war there are diverse anti heroes, but our Ronny is a “tailor made anti hero”! The man who abandoned the battlefield and swam home in one piece, is a senior nutrition engineer, a doctor of organic chemistry, manager of a huge laboratory at Tnuva, the company that monopolizes the Israeli dairy industry. When the researcher parted with him, totally shocked by his war story, she had but one thing to say about him: he is so normal that I am totally disturbed. The unbelievable story which is concisely conveyed in the film (yet of all the interviewees captures the most time on screen) leaves you deep in thought: how can it be that this man who escaped hell by tooth and nail while death enveloped him came out of the entire affair disturbingly normal. And if indeed he came out in one piece, unruffled, what does that say about us and the small traumas we go through in life which we don’t stop complaining about.
Shmuel Frenkel:
Just before the world premiere of “Waltz with Bashir”, Shmuel Frenkel will compete for the first time in the “Iron Man” competition in Frankfurt, Germany. He will swim 4 kilometers, will bike ride 80 kilometers and will top it off by running a full marathon. All this because a simple triathlon or marathon in steaming hot July is not enough for him anymore. Physical challenges evaporate before his eyes. He considers activities involving physical effort and human mental endurance small change. Frenkel remained in the army many years after he danced the waltz at that cursed junction in West Beirut. He specialized in various martial arts, was Israel’s champion 8 years running in an eccentric martial art known as "Dennis Survival" whereby two competitors essentially bash each other’s brains out until one surrenders. No holds barred! Frenkel is the oldest competitor to ever win the competition and actually started training only after the age of 30. Whoever served in the military with Frenkel is extremely familiar with his wife Miri, who despite strict army regulations was with him throughout his military service, except when he was dispatched on military operations. Somehow, she always found a way to wait for him at the end of the day in his tent, secretly, in the middle of the night, in the most remote locations on the planet. Miri, whom he calls Yoko, was always there. No one figured out how. Incidentally, they are happily married and have five children.
Dror Harazi:
Dror Harazi had one dream in life and that was to be a military general, like his father, like many members of his family, military men. But somehow fate would have it otherwise and Harazi found himself that cruel afternoon at the gates of the Shatila refugee camp. He was at the front line, with the tank squadron he commanded over. And though he did everything he could to alert people to the situation, eventually he became the system’s ultimate victim. The little man, the gatekeeper, the one who is known in Hebrew as the military base sentry, the man who ultimately always pays the price for crimes that men greater than him, much greater than him, are guilty of. Harazi was prematurely retired from the military, with much disgrace, virtually without explanations. It was convenient to blame him, a quiet and passive man who now bears this insult his entire life. It doesn’t let go. If only they would have listened to him, hundreds or thousands of lives would have been spared. Harazi considers his participation in “Waltz with Bashir” a necessity, a cry out, another last attempt to tell his story knowing full well that nothing can now change history.
Ron Ben-Yeshai:
Undoubtedly the greatest and most important Israeli war correspondent of all time, the man who became a genuine legend at the height of his career. Ron Ben-Yishai was wounded three times while covering bloody battles, twice during the War of Attrition in the late 1960s and once in Kosovo. And as if that isn’t enough, he was awarded the Chief of General Staff Medal of Honor, the most honorable citation of bravery granted an Israeli soldier, for being caught in heavy Egyptian bombing while reporting for TV during the Yom Kippur War and single handedly rescuing many injured troops. No doubt, the man is a legend! He is seared into the collective Israeli memory with his forty years of broadcasting, from the Six Day War through all the Israeli wars to date, and his reports from Baghdad while blood curdling events occurred in the backdrop of the broadcast frame. Therefore, it is only natural that Ari remembers him well from West Beirut, walking tall among the bullets, fearless, gazing at hell with eyes open, calm. Supposedly many former Israeli soldiers, throughout too many wars, have the same image of the man. Ron Ben-Yishai paid a high price for the telephone call he made the night he reported to Minister of Defense Arik Sharon on the massacre at refugee camps Sabra and Shatila. Sharon, who preferred to do nothing to stop the massacre that night, never forgot, and for twenty years he made sure that Ron Ben-Yishai would never be promoted to a managerial position at the Israeli National Broadcasting Corps.
I found one Hayao Miyazaki interview and there are many thoughts/explanations about his ideas in “Spirited Away” that shows that this film is strongly connected with Japanese spiritual practices Shinto/ Shintao as we talked in last class + other interesting details.
Interview with Hayao Miyazaki
movies.ign.com
by Steven Horn
“I am not a big fan of evaluating a film based on its box office receipts. I believe a film should represent a very intimate personal encounter between what’s on the screen and what’s in an individual’s heart. To try to reduce that to numbers on a page is not something I can be a fan of.” Whether Spirited Away finds a wide audience here or not, it stands as a must-see for fans of animation and of storytelling in general. During a recent question and answer session at Hollywood’s famed El Capitan theater, Mr. Miyazaki shared his thoughts on a variety of subjects both in the animation world and film as a whole.
On the motifs of flight and pigs in his films: “My feeling is that we human beings are able to exist on planet Earth and are also stuck here because of gravity. Flight expresses a liberation from that grounding. Pigs symbolize greed but they are also quite likeable and you really can’t bring yourself to hate them’ just the way I feel about humans.” On some of the themes in Spirited Away: “The relationship between Chihiro and her parents is very typical of most family relationships in Japan. I was inspired to make this film when a daughter of mine turned 10. The most important thing for me in making this movie was to persuade the 10-year-olds that this movie was for them. I wanted them to be able to recognize themselves in the characters. I think I would like them to leave the movie theater with a sense of humility about the complexity and difficulties of the world we live in. I think an encounter with film is always an encounter with something new, so I think the possibility for everyone in the world appreciating the film is definitely there.” On Shintao and its inspiration for the film's setting: “My understanding of the history of Shintao is many centuries ago, the originators of Japan used Shintao to unify the country and that it then ended up inspiring many wars of aggression against our neighbors. There is still a great deal of ambiguity and contradiction in Japan about our relationship to Shintao. Many wish to deny it, to reject it. My feeling is that I have an appreciation for the very humble rural Shintao rituals that continue to this day throughout rural Japan, especially one ritual that takes place on solstice. The villagers call on all of the local gods and invite them to bathe in their bath.” On the look of the film: “All of the design that is featured as artwork in the movie is hand-drawn. We’ve given it a little elegance boost with digital technology. In digital technology, the color hues remain profoundly unstable so I instructed my staff to never trust the computer screen, rather only the way the color looks to their own eyes on paper.” Fundamentally, the animation is all pencil-drawn. In a few scenes we turned to digital; for instance to create patterns on the waves or to show bubbling water. As we headed into production on this film, I gathered my staff and I said to them, ‘This is a two-dimensional film. This is our strength.’ There is a fundamental difference in thinking about how to approach a 2-D versus a 3-D film. For example, Yubaba’s head (large as it is) is not always the same size in every scene. Depending on my mood and her mood, the size of her head changes. This is an emotional relationship we develop through scale with the audience, one that we would have to abandon if we wholeheartedly embraced digital technology. I'm holding onto my pencil, thank you.”
Shinto (神道, Shintō?) or kami-no-michi is the natural spirituality of Japan and the Japanese people. The word Shinto ("Way of the Gods") was adopted from the written Chinese (神道),[1] combining two kanji: "shin" (神?), meaning gods or spirits (originally from the Chinese word shen); and "tō" (道?), or "do" meaning a philosophical path or study (originally from the Chinese word tao). [1][2]
Shinto incorporates spiritual practices derived from many local and regional prehistoric traditions, but did not emerge as a formal centralized religious institution until the arrival of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, beginning in the 6th century.[3] Buddhism gradually adapted in Japan to the native spirituality. (See article on "syncretism".)
To make such a museum, Miyazaki had a clear vision in mind "The building must be put together as it were a film. Not an overbearing flamboyant, gaudy or suffocating building, but a place where people can make themselves at home, especially when it’s not crowded. Something to make people want to touch the things in it. A building through which air and light can freely flow.”
Miyazaki made this film without knowing how ist going to end. -Samuli
"Since you say you don't know what the ending of a story will be when you start drawing storyboards, is there a certain method or order you adhere to in order to arrive at the story's conclusion?
Yes, there is an internal order, the demands of the story itself, which lead me to the conclusion. There are 1415 different shots in Spirited Away. When starting the project, I had envisioned about 1200, but the film told me no, it had to be more than 1200. It's not me who makes the film. The film makes itself and I have no choice but to follow."
Chihiro and her family are on their way to their new house in the suburbs when her father decides to take a shortcut along a lonely-looking dirt road. After getting out of the car and walking along a path for a while, they discover an open-air restaurant filled with food but with no workers or customers present. Mom and Dad don't hesitate to sit down and dig in, but Chihiro senses danger and refuses. As night falls, she is terrified to see the area fill with faceless spirits, but when she runs to find her parents, she discovers that they have been turned into pigs. She is found by a mysterious boy named Haku, who promises to help her. He gets her a job working in a nearby building, which turns out to be a bathhouse for the thousands of Japan's gods and spirits. Though the work is hard and the people strange, she does as well as she can. Her parents, however, are still waiting in the hotel's stockyard, and Chihiro must find a way to break the spell on them before they end up as the main course of some guest's dinner. Written by Jean-Marc Rocher {rocher@fiberbit.net}
While moving to a new home in Japan, Chihiro and her parents take a wrong turn down a mysterious wooded path. They come across an ominous-looking tunnel of which only Chihiro is scared. Going through the tunnel, they are lead them to a mysterious town filled with restaurants that have all kinds of delicious food on display. Chihiro's parents quickly sit down and start gorging themselves, assuming they will pay the restaurant upon their return. Chihiro's doubt of this strange town leads her to wander off, and she comes across a building of titanic size, where a young boy warns her to leave before nightfall. However, as the sun sets, the town begins to fill up with the gods of Japan's mythology, and Chihiro returns to find her parents mysteriously turned into pigs. The young boy, Haku, works in the building, which is a bathhouse for 8 Million gods. He helps Chihiro find work in this new world, find a way to save her parents from a dinner platter, and find her way home. Written by Jason Krischke
The story begins as Chihiro and her parents take a wrong turn down a dirt path while traveling to their new home in the country side. They discover a tunnel at the bottom of the path which leads them into an old abandoned theme park. While Chihiro and and her parents explore the place they come across a place full of restraunts filled with all different kinds of delicious foods. Chihiro's parents then start helping themselves to some food. As Chihiro leaves her parents and starts exploring the place herself she comes upon a bridge only to be found by a boy named Haku. The boy then tells Chihiro that she must leave before nightfall. She then runs off to find her parents only to find them as pigs. Chihiro gets scared and runs off to the river only to find it full of water. She then runs off and hides, Haku then comes looking for Chihiro promising her that he will help her save her parents but the only way was for Chihiro to get a job in the bathhouse for the Gods and spirits of Japan. Written by Brian Liu
"Fantastic Planet"
Film "Fantastic Planet" visuals craetes atmosphere that also reminds Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico deserted landscapes.
