A Film a Week - The Crystal Planet / Kristalni planet

 previously published on Cineuropa

After the death of the only Yugoslav Oscar winner, Dušan Vukotić (1927-1998), who won his statuette for the animated short The Substitute (1961), it took Croatian filmmaker Arsen Anton Ostojić a decade to ask for and acquire the rights to film Vukotić’s unfinished feature-length animated project The Crystal Planet, for which the latter also wrote the story. It was a further decade or so before Ostojić actually started making the project come to life. The modern animated feature is now completed and ready to be presented to a worldwide audience. After its world premiere at the Zlín Film Festival, it was presented to the Croatian public at the Pula Film Festival, where it won the Special Golden Arena for its contribution to Croatian animation.

After her mother’s death in an accident, 11-year-old girl Rea reluctantly moves with her engineer father, Val, to the titular crystal planet in order to start a new life. The father is about to begin a new job as the right-hand man to the robot-factory owner and ruler of the planet, Governor Mordokan. The entrepreneur’s newest inventions are (still glitchy) robotic pets, as animals are forbidden on the planet. Elections are just around the corner, and Val’s efforts are needed to secure the governor’s victory against rival candidate Sandra, who campaigns on environmental issues.

All Rea wants is to go back to Earth, which she still calls home. But things begin to change when she meets and befriends her next-door neighbour, Sandra’s son Andy. On one of their first adventures, they encounter and save the cub of a local animal species and realise that the planet has its own ecosystem that is being endangered by the pollution created by Mordokan’s factory. They try to keep their find a secret, but the revelation threatens to rewrite all of the rules on the planet. Two single-parent families, with the help of the intelligent and empathetic species, must therefore fight the establishment.

The Crystal Planet is clearly aimed at younger audiences, so one shouldn’t expect any kind of nuance in delivering its environmentally conscious message. The heroes and villains simply wear their allegiances, and often their thoughts and inner turmoil, on their sleeves. The storytelling also suffers from some deus ex machina plot devices and twists, while mimicking the US style of children’s animation and even introducing a couple of songs as transitions between the acts. However, the script written by Ostojić, Aleksandar Žiljak and Brett Shumway redeems itself with some warm-hearted humour and a good helping of sincerity.

On the technical side, the combination of model-based animation and CGI serves its purpose perfectly well, as it is blended together smoothly, so the work of the team of animators should be commended. The same goes for Tomáš Sysel’s cinematography, which creates the sense of a well-rounded world while capturing the heroes in action and the rich background textures at the same time. Arsen Anton Ostojić’s sure-handed directing might come as a surprise for an animation first-timer (although he did co-produce one such title, The Oddsockeaters, back in 2016), and the editing by Lucie Haladová helps everything flow smoothly while keeping the running time around the 90-minute mark.

The Crystal Planet is a very ambitious film. The existence of dubbed versions in several languages, including the worldwide one in English (voiced by, among others, Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave and Michael York), could help the movie cross several borders. In the context of Croatian cinema, it is a valuable addition to the recently revived tradition of feature-length animation for younger audiences.

A Film a Week - Extraordinary / Glavonja

 previously published on Cineuropa

As a global society, we are becoming increasingly aware that we are not all the same, so a “one size fits all” approach cannot be applied to everyone. The differences between specific needs and reactions can and should be noted from an early age, so that we can create a flexible world based on acceptance, which can serve as a decent home for everyone. In the cinematic world, this is being reflected in the ongoing trend towards movies for younger audiences featuring characters that are on the autism spectrum and sending the message that they should be accepted as they are.

The newest addition to this canon comes in the form of Extraordinary by Marina Andree Škop and Vanda Raymanová. It has already enjoyed a gala premiere and a wide theatrical release in Croatia. However, at BUFF Malmö, the film festival for children’s and youth audiences, it is celebrating its first international screening.

Alisa (newcomer Marta Mihanović) lives in the shadow of her brother Milan (Maks Kleončić), who is a bit out of the ordinary and whose needs mean he gets all of the attention from their parents (Ajda Smrekar and Matej Puc). Milan always wears a leather helmet on his head, since it helps him block out the loud sounds from the outside world. He is also able to walk along straight, clearly marked lines, and his preferred ritual is drawing straight lines on perfectly white sheets of paper with his pen. As Alisa likes to say, he lives in his own world.

The social services, represented by two agents (Judita Franković Brdar and Borko Perić), are always on the parents’ case, trying to take Milan to a medical facility, so the family moves from the city to the nearby countryside. After an accident befalls each of the over-stressed parents, they both end up in the local hospital, where the doctor (Csongor Kassai) and the stern head nurse (Gabriela Dzuríková) have sinister plans for them. So, the siblings, with the help of a trio of local kids playing detectives (Andrija Lamot, Mark Spiridonović and Martin Pišlar), set off on an adventure to find them, revealing a heist plot in the process. For the first time, the “extraordinary” Milan has to face the ordinary world…

The duo of directors works in perfect synergy here. Marina Andree Škop has made a name for herself with children’s films (for instance, the 2019 title My Grandpa Is an Alien) and knows how to gently steer her young actors in the desired direction. This is especially the case for the two leads, as Marta Mihanović showcases both her character’s inner strength and vulnerability at the same time, which is quite a task even for experienced thesps, while Maks Kleončić possesses the necessary mix of calmness and expressiveness that is needed for the character of Milan, who does not speak. On the other hand, Vanda Raymanová comes from the realm of animation, which is crucial for a heavily stylised film such as this one, where the characters exist against backgrounds consisting of photographic imagery refined with hand-drawn details, and where the travelling sequences are made in a cute form of 2D animation.

Extraordinary might be a tad over the top with its striking design cues and the almost cartoonish concepts of the adult characters. Also, the detective plot is possibly too far removed from the initial topic, so it might resonate better with parents than with children. But the simple, positive message of friendship and acceptance it conveys, as well as its unapologetic playfulness, makes it a praiseworthy effort.

A Film a Week: Irkalla: Gilgamesh's Dream / Irkalla Hulm Jijiljamish

 previously published on Cineuropa

In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Irkalla is the underworld inhabited by the dead, the demons and the deities. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the titular hero visited Irkalla on one of his missions. There is a theory concerning the lost, last tablet of the epic describing the hero’s second journey to the underworld. This serves as the source of Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji’s newest feature, Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream, which has just premiered in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.

Baghdad, 2019. The clashes between the police, protesters and different militias, often with terrorist agendas, create chaos on the streets. Everybody has lost somebody over the decades of wars and dictatorship. Our hero, Chum-Chum (Yussef Husham Al-Thahabi), is a sweet nine-year-old orphan who lives in a makeshift settlement of abandoned boats and barges on the Tigris River. For him, the epic of Gilgamesh, seen as an animated series on tapes on the school bus, is real, and the Tigris serves as the gateway to Irkalla, where he hopes to meet his dead parents. He even sees an elderly fisherman (Ahmed Layo) as Gilgamesh, his potential guide to the underworld.

The commune of homeless kids is run by a streetwise young hoodlum, Moody (Hussein Raad Zuwayr), who wants to earn enough money to take himself, Chum-Chum and Chum-Chum’s sister Sarah (Lojin Star Naima), whom he takes a romantic interest in, to the Netherlands. To achieve this, Moody does not shy away from anything – from collecting scrap metal for recycling to pickpocketing and performing missions for the militia run by the mysterious Sheikh (Jabaar Al-Janabii). What starts out as spying on and filming the routines of the kids’ teacher Mariam (Samar Kadhim Jawad) soon morphs into something more dangerous and ethically dubious. Is there a way for Chum-Chum to survive and stay pure in this dirty, perilous world?

Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream is a film for a specific target audience – youngsters over 14 years of age – and, as such, does a rare thing in portraying the street life of Baghdad from a child’s perspective, which at times seems very grim and down to earth and, at other times, naive with a hint of fantasy to it. And Al-Daradji manages to achieve this by getting the audience to feel empathy for his characters’ actions and causes. Ultimately, he points out the universal truth that hurt people hurt people, but he does so with a sense of authenticity.

The style of the film is suitable for its audience, but not exactly groundbreaking, as the filmmaker opts for a combination of handheld camerawork and drone shots of the city and the ongoing chaos there. The animations of Chum-Chum’s fantasies are a nice touch, however. In the acting department, allowances should be made for every individual performance, since the cast members’ experience in performing is extremely limited. Also, the melancholic orchestral music by Mike and Fabien Kourtzer is sometimes overly on the nose in its attempt to get us to feel a maximum of emotion. The script by Al-Daradji and Karim Traidia, with co-writers Shahad Ameen and Hasan Falih as “helping hands”, becomes problematic as well, as it gets predictable once the exposition is over and done with.

So, Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream will not score any extra points for originality or subtlety, but with movies for younger audiences, this is not the main goal, after all. Nonetheless, it is an authentic, and symbolically and emotionally potent movie.