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sparbled and chased
Tuesday, 15 June 2010 12:47 pmToday's subject line courtesy of Worthless Word for the Day. "Sparble" is a verb meaning "to scatter or disperse", but mostly I just like the way it sounds. The sixteenth century has a good line in words.
We did Movie Club again on Friday night, finally, after several months of arbing around being disorganised. It was my choice, with a theme I delineated as "Weird-Arse French Animation", but in fact it might just as well have been "French drawings of boobies!" We watched Les Triplettes de Belleville, which I'd seen before and which is awesome, and Gandahar, which is obscure and trippy but also fairly awesome.
Les Triplettes de Belleville is your perfectly standard retro-animated quest narrative involving Tour de France cyclists kidnapped by the Mafia for an underground betting ring which is subsequently broken up by mad, musical, apparently indestructible old ladies. It's surreal, beautifully understated apart from the grotesque exaggeration of the animation (giant French noses ftw!), almost entirely without dialogue, and completely demented. Stv and I were braced for it, having seen it before, but I think it may have broken Jo's brain a bit. (The dog being used as a tyre seemed to get to her). Also, I find the frog-eating a bit difficult. The boobies come in in the initial "Belleville Rendezvous" 1920s music-hall song, performed by the titular triplets with a Josephine-Baker-style dancer. It's insanely catchy and has been revolving around my head, and in my dreams, since Friday. It's a lovely movie, for a given value of "lovely".
Gandahar was more of a gamble: late-80s French/Korean animated sf directed by René Laloux, who is also responsible for Fantastic Planet, which I haven't got around to watching yet. Gandahar has a dreamy, pen-and-wash style to its backgrounds and a sort of stripped-down simplicity to the characters; it features noble, beautiful Gandaharians, strangely twisted and deformed mutants, armies of metallic men with red glows in their chests, giant insane brains, time travel, incredible quantities of topless women, and an underlying peaceful-existence eco-theme that I darkly suspect James Cameron may have ripped off for Avatar. It's the kind of film that vaguely makes me wish I actually did psychedelics, I suspect they'd help; the plot is fairly tightly-knit and coherent, but a lot of the images are extremely weird.
I enjoyed the film, in a dreamy, detached sort of fashion, and I loved the art. I'm also fascinated that I've managed to hang around on sf blogs and sites and in sf criticism for about ten years and have never actually heard of this film apart from the random mention in passing which prompted me to order it. Clearly French sf flies below the radar. Possibly because of all the boobies.
We did Movie Club again on Friday night, finally, after several months of arbing around being disorganised. It was my choice, with a theme I delineated as "Weird-Arse French Animation", but in fact it might just as well have been "French drawings of boobies!" We watched Les Triplettes de Belleville, which I'd seen before and which is awesome, and Gandahar, which is obscure and trippy but also fairly awesome.
Les Triplettes de Belleville is your perfectly standard retro-animated quest narrative involving Tour de France cyclists kidnapped by the Mafia for an underground betting ring which is subsequently broken up by mad, musical, apparently indestructible old ladies. It's surreal, beautifully understated apart from the grotesque exaggeration of the animation (giant French noses ftw!), almost entirely without dialogue, and completely demented. Stv and I were braced for it, having seen it before, but I think it may have broken Jo's brain a bit. (The dog being used as a tyre seemed to get to her). Also, I find the frog-eating a bit difficult. The boobies come in in the initial "Belleville Rendezvous" 1920s music-hall song, performed by the titular triplets with a Josephine-Baker-style dancer. It's insanely catchy and has been revolving around my head, and in my dreams, since Friday. It's a lovely movie, for a given value of "lovely".
Gandahar was more of a gamble: late-80s French/Korean animated sf directed by René Laloux, who is also responsible for Fantastic Planet, which I haven't got around to watching yet. Gandahar has a dreamy, pen-and-wash style to its backgrounds and a sort of stripped-down simplicity to the characters; it features noble, beautiful Gandaharians, strangely twisted and deformed mutants, armies of metallic men with red glows in their chests, giant insane brains, time travel, incredible quantities of topless women, and an underlying peaceful-existence eco-theme that I darkly suspect James Cameron may have ripped off for Avatar. It's the kind of film that vaguely makes me wish I actually did psychedelics, I suspect they'd help; the plot is fairly tightly-knit and coherent, but a lot of the images are extremely weird.
I enjoyed the film, in a dreamy, detached sort of fashion, and I loved the art. I'm also fascinated that I've managed to hang around on sf blogs and sites and in sf criticism for about ten years and have never actually heard of this film apart from the random mention in passing which prompted me to order it. Clearly French sf flies below the radar. Possibly because of all the boobies.
