Reviews
Showing the dos and don't of computer generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery has transformed children's cinema. Hand-drawn cel animation still exists, but it's too expensive and time-consuming to be used on mainstream features and it is now usually consigned to shorts and art films. However, there are exceptions, and one of the most outstanding is Michel Ocelot's Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest.
Ocelot will already be familiar to some audiences for his charming films about a little West African boy who refuses to let life get the better of him. But Azur & Asmar surpasses both Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998) and Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) by returning to the silhouette style borrowed from the great German animator, Lotte Reiniger, that Ocelot first employed on the little-seen 2000 saga, Prince and Princesses.
Quite simply, this is a masterpiece that combines cut-out techniques with CGI and the mesmeric beauty of medieval and Islamic art to create a magical world, in which scarlet lions with blue claws and birds with rainbow wings stand between the blonde, blue-eyed Azur and Asmar, the estranged Arab friend of his childhood, as they seek to rescue the Djinn Fairy from her Crystal Cell in the Hall of Light, deep within the Black Cliff. Moreover, this Arabian Nights tale of derring-do and brotherly loyalty uses the traditional fairytale format to pass powerful comment on the need for tolerance between the rival faiths of the Middle East.
only all animated films were made with such intelligence, sensitivity and artistic grace. However, the majority are on a par with Michael Hegner and Karsten Kiilerich's The Ugly Duckling and Me! To be fair, there's nothing too objectionable about this Danish updating of Hans Christian Andersen's beloved fable, in which a rodentine con-merchant named Ratso sets out to showcase Ugly the duckling at the circus. However, he doesn't count either on being followed by an old flame bent on marriage or on becoming increasingly fond of his new feathered friend. However, the dialogue is often coarse and self-consciously colloquial, while the action too often descends into socko violence and broad farce. The storytelling isn't up to much, either, and the characterisation is often as clumsy as the CGI visuals, which have the look of a cheap Eurokids TV show. Yet, it's easy to see toddlers lapping this up, as it keeps moving at a cracking pace, makes no undue demands on their imagination and unfussily peddles the age-old message that it's OK to be different, providing you find lots of others to be different with.
Curiously, this is also the moral of Jia Zhangke's Still Life, the winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, which is showing at the National Film Theatre as part of a month-long tribute to the most enigmatic of Sixth Generation Chinese film-makers.
The price of progress is laid bare in this sobering study of the destruction of the ancient town of Fengjie to make way for the ginormous Three Gorges Dam. But this is as much a record of an unsought twilight as a linear narrative, with miner Han Sanming's search for the wife and daughter he's not seen for 16 years and nurse Zhao Tao's pursuit of her missing husband being mere sideshows to the reckless demolition and soulless construction being sanctioned by a government that prioritises economic expansion over any human consequences.
The despondent tone is reinforced by Yu Lik-wai's wistful photography. But there are still a number of amusing moments, most notably the sudden and unexplained launch of a spaceship behind the mountainous horizon - a curiously unremarked upon happenstance that has been incorporated into this resolutely realist drama by the magic of, you guessed it, CGI!
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