Trailer Rush: Metropia
Animation’s all grown up
I found this trailer and these amazing stills literally over half a month ago and still haven’t posted them. Don’t ask me why. I could tell you I was busy, sorting out old student loans or tuning up my car, but the truth is that I probably just didn’t know what to say about them. And maybe I still don’t.
On a personal level I could tell you that I always imagined animation getting dark and serious one day. And not like Coraline dark. I’m talking depressing, no-irony dark. I envisioned the style serving as some kind of metaphor for maybe the falseness of a character’s life, how, to that character, everything might feel forced and fabricated, plastic–pixalated. The image I had–and don’t ask me why–is of a gritty cartoon man sitting on the edge of his bed, shirt off, his sheets tangled and crumpled behind him. He’s slumped over with his head in his hand. He’s looking around, examining the dim yellow light leaking from his closet door, the blue glow of the blocky numbers on his alarm clock. The silence. The fibers of who knows what in his carpet.
I don’t know. This is just always what came to mind when I thought about animation’s new breed–Animation: The New Class–when a big-time director would take on an animated film and everybody would be shocked.
To be fair, animation has changed, is really always changing. Digital design obviously redefined everything when it came along, and then there’s claymation, and stop-motion, and rotoscoping, semi-big names like Richard Linklater using it to wax philosophic in things like Waking Life. Or just look at the beginning 10 or 15minutes of Up, just how surprising and powerful and sad it is. Check out Wall-E, with its jaw-droppingly impressive visuals and more mature and risky dramatic techniques (like how much in the movie is expressed through wordlessness). And then there’s the raunchiness of something like a Team America: World Police, or the relentlessly depressing nature of a Grave of the Fireflies.
So this is me acknowledging the other side of the scale. Changes have been made. They have. But still…not the changes I’ve always kind of wanted. You can say all day that something like Wall-E isn’t strictly a “kid’s” movie–and I’d probably agree, maybe it’s not–but it’s not an “adult” movie, either. And that’s what I’m talking about. The change I’m waiting for is one that will make animated films not just “adult enough” but “adult – period,” something that will stop me from always lumping animated movies, no matter how much I love them, in with other animated movies. Stop me from thinking about them differently.
I’ve always been of the mind that anything can be good, that if you don’t like an entire genre you just haven’t seen the exception yet, that the idea of girls liking “chick flicks” and guys liking explosions is bogus. So why then do I still have a faction set up in my mind, animated movies on one side and everything else on the other?
This big tonal change I’m thinking of, it’s not just about something being deadpan or cynical, either; I don’t need an ending to go all existential on me, suggest that morality and God and love don’t actually exist, or for a script to explore human consciousness for me to qualify a cartoon as “adult.” But if something did go that way, it’d be a total paradigm shift for the genre (if you could call animation a genre), and I’d be taken back. And there’s nothing like being taken back at the movies. That’s when material really sinks in.
So I do think there is a place for Bergman themes and Gilliam surreality in animation. And I don’t know if Metropia will be the one to find that place, make us believe that the content really does warrant the form, but I’m hoping. Because, really, these screenshots are just incredible.
I know I really didn’t say much about this particular movie, but what’s there to say? It’s from Sweden; it features voice acting from Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis; it has an adult rating; it’s set in a dystopia. But it’s the pictures that are important. Just look at them; they articulate far more than I or any description ever could.
Here’s the trailer. Despite voice work from American actors, no US release is set.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 2:26 pm and is filed under film, trailers/news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
