originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/767428...
So first up, thanks for all the sudden appreciation from Hungarian tumblr for Animation Night 157. @70snasagay, @leafthesheep and @critterofthenight, it means a lot!
In that spirit, and since it’s been long enough for certain films to get a release beyond film festivals, I’m gonna follow it up tonight with more Hungarian animation! Last time we gave an overview of the Hungarian school of animation with a focus on absolute legend Marcell Jankovics, and there is still much more of the historical story to tell, tonight I’ll be focusing on the most recent animated films of Hungary. (Sadly I am limited in time and can’t dive quite so in-depth, but the films I have are quite special.)
If any of you were reading my writeups on the Annecy festival last year, you might recall how taken I was with a film called Four Souls of Coyote (Hungarian: Kojot négy lelke, tho the film is also dubbed quite well to English). Here’s what I wrote back then…
This is a Hungarian movie based on (nonspecifically…) Indigenous stories, with the framing device of the story being told by an old man at the Standing Rock pipeline protests. The bulk of the film is an origin story for the world: Old Man Creator - not the top god in this situation - creates Turtle Island and fills it with creatures. In a dream, he creates Coyote, and mistreats him at once; Coyote, an obligate carnivore in a world that does not yet know death, steals the creation mud and creates humans
So most of the film then tells how, through a series of events, Coyote ends up complicating the idyllic scenario by introducing death into the world, and sexual reproduction, and inspiring the creation of lightning and fire before being betrayed by the humans he created, eaten, and on his final life, driven away. It’s a really interesting sort of mythological schema: even Old Man Creator doesn’t know the why of it all, and there’s this kind of idea that a lot of the way things work happened not by design but by mistake (perhaps according to the ineffable design of a higher, more numinous power), and once something is created it’s irrevocably part of the world, so we just have to make do.
I have no idea what’s based on mythology and what was created by the Hungarians, but what makes this all work is the incredible animation. This is just a really really strong work of traditional animation, with fantastic colour and compositing to boot. It might genuinely be the best looking film I’ve seen this whole festival so far, which is nuts. There are all sorts of characterful touches in every shot, the magic is presented in a really elegantly straightforward way, and the whole story unfolds with a compelling degree of intricacy and tension, setup and payoff.
Coyote, the famous trickster, is certainly the main character of this movie. He’s a fascinating character; arrogant, quick to lie and in love with his own cleverness but also we can see his pride comes from the rough circumstances of his creation, where he’s chewed out by his creator from the get go and everyone pushes him away.
The last arc of the film, which I won’t spoil here, is where it really goes hard: bridging the gap from a mythological past to the ugly conflict of modern history and elegantly weaving the Europeans into the story it’s telling. It is the moment of Coyote’s greatest mistakes, but also the most character development. Absolutely incredible to watch. Kind of devastating! That’s the way of it!
Alongside that, our second act is another flavour of Hungarian film entirely. This is White Plastic Sky, a full-rotoscope scifi film in the fashion of A Scanner Darkly. Its world conceit is that the ecosystem has collapsed, leaving humanity contained in small cities whose oxygen is provided by the ingenious expedient of transforming humans into trees. The main character sees his wife volunteer to become a tree, a decision he refuses to accept, and he pulls all the strings he can to first free her against her wishes, and then as two fugitives, journey to the origin of the tree system to find the scientist who created it. Which is to say: classic high-concept science fiction, with some gorgeous imagery and a fantastic mood.
This film is kind of hell to acquire in the UK. There’s no official release, it’s not on any pirate sites in usable quality, and in the end the only way I managed to get my hands on it was to VPN into the Czech Republic in order to buy a download using google pay. But I did that! And I found some subs which were only mistimed by 40,700ms. So we can watch this movie too!
Besides that, we have a really cool first-person short film about a fly, an amazing work of background animation. Thanks to a wonderful article by Animation Obsessive (drink), you can read about this film in parallel to another from Yugoslavia. Director Ferenc Rofusz, following in the footsteps of his mentor Jankovics, managed to convince the state it was worth producing, but struggled to find the resources to singlehandedly animate this crazy ambitious project.
There are no characters in Rofusz’s film — instead, the whole screen animates. Where the Zagreb Fly is an exercise in limited animation, this is a frenzy of movement. We take the fly’s perspective as it goes from forest to yard to house, only to be trapped inside with an unseen human. The sound design is anxiety-inducing: the endless buzzing, the footsteps, the human’s swings. We, as the fly, are hunted.
The whole short is available on Youtube, right here:
There are many more stories to tell about Hungarian animation - honestly Hungary rivals France for the number of interesting films drawn there, an animation tradition unique and all the more remarkable for continuing to today. but for now, I am running late already, and this will have to suffice!
Animation Night 195 will begin very shortly at twitch.tv/canmom - I hope you can join me!
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