I watched Mars Express the other day, a French animated Sci-fi film from last year and it was fantastic. Lots of cool ideas, great style and an interesting story, absolutely gets my recommendation.
I also watched the short series Crisis Jung by the same director, it was kind of like a gay French fist of the North Star, not as good as Mars Express but still a fun watch with lots of gore, dark humour and animated close-ups of arseholes
I've never watched any European animations before other than some tv shows when I was kid, and The Peasants if that counts, (also really good) anyone have any good recommendations?
Fantastic Planet and The Triplets of Belleville are the obvious one and they're definitely next on my list but don't really have any idea other than that
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Are you at all familiar with the films of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer? He is one of the great stop-motion animators of all time, with Alice (1988) being the best example of his craft - a dark, surreal, almost dialogue-free adaptation of Alice in Wonderland featuring a live-action girl in a nightmarish stop-motion world. The most faithful adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, it's also the darkest by far, filled with Svankmajer's trademark surreal grotesquerie (but, unlike some of Svankmajer's other films, this one is subtle and restrained). Fellow Czech Jiří Barta is another legend, with his 1986 classic The Pied Piper being a good starting point. Karel Zeman is another Czech animator who made some very well-regarded stop-motion animated films, but good luck finding any of his films in English.
Russian animator Yuri Norstein is one of the all-time greats, with his short films Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and Tale of Tales (1979) being his most well-known and highly acclaimed films (Tale of Tales has been called the greatest animated short film of all time by many critics, although I personally prefer Hedgehog in the Fog). His feature film The Overcoat has been in production for decades now.
Bruno Bozzetto is a highly regarded Italian cartoonist who has made a number of animated films, with the most well-known being Allegro non troppo (1976), a sort of spoof of Disney's Fantasia that, at times, actually feels more like a spiritual successor to it.
Danish animator Anders Morgenthaler's brutally violent 2006 film Princess is an intense and harrowing animation detailing a missionary priest who brings along his 5-year-old niece on a roaring rampage of bloody revenge against the porn industry that killed his sister and molested his niece. For those with a very high tolerance for this sort of thing, it is a shockingly good film filled with genuine heartbreaking pathos, tackling very heavy and uncomfortable themes in a way that a live-action film simply couldn't. Now this is actually adult animation, in stark contrast to the puerile "adult animation" garbage made for immature adolescent boys in the South Park and Family Guy vein.
Irish animator Tomm More has made some very highly acclaimed films, including The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014). He does incredible things with relatively low-budget Flash animation, bringing his wildly imaginative fantasy worlds to vivid life.
German animator Lotte Reiniger's 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature (the oldest animated feature, the 1917 Argentinian film El apóstol, is lost). While the film's storytelling leaves a lot to be desired, it is, nevertheless, a visual feast and a truly fascinating relic (especially for film buffs and animation buffs).
The 2007 French-Iranian film Persepolis, which Marjane Satrapi adapted from her popular graphic novels, received universal acclaim, although I personally thought that it suffered from very poor storytelling, with the film having a very choppy, episodic structure, despite the dazzling visual panache. But, again, most people loved it.
The 2009 British animation My Dog Tulip may be a bit too low-key and quirky for some, but don't worry: it certainly never comes anywhere close to Wes Anderson-style smarmy hipster artifice and, for dog lovers, it's a must-see, detailing one man's close relationship with his beloved German shepherd rescue.
If you're craving something truly weird and challenging, the critically acclaimed Polish avant-garde psychological horror-drama arthouse animation Kill It and Leave This Town (2020) is currently on Tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/706586/kill-it-and-leave-this-town
...as is the much more mainstream Serbian sci-fi animation Technotise: Edit & I (2009), which I personally found to be pretty meh and largely an exercise in style over substance, but which a lot of people really liked: https://tubitv.com/movies/522270/technotise-edit-i
Anything distributed in America by GKIDS will undoubtedly be of interest, as they exclusively distribute high-quality animated films from all over the world: https://gkids.com/films/
I can name many, many, many more if you're interested.
!kino !neurodivergents !effortposters
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!effortposters If you ever doubted this neighbor has been in solitary, he's had time to think about things.
Somebody said I should watch this, but I never have. I knew a lot of Iranian women from all over the country from different backgrounds and stuff. And I just think of every time I watch a movie about the Vietnam War with someone who was in it and they always apologize for wasting my time because it's what movie critics want to see, not anything true. I've learned so much more from actually talking to these people.
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zoz
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zle
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zozzle
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ive only ever seen The Color of Pomegranate and I wont watch anymore persian arthouse
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I watched Taste of Cherry. Like happens so often there's all these fricking white atheist film reviewers who say this is a great movie that says so much about the human spirit or some shit. And I'm sitting here noticing there's a lot of this where he's talking to a Kurd about the war they fought with them. Which is an incredibly complex topic that I don't begin to understand. What I do understand is they're actually literally talking about the war in Kurdistan around 1980. And I'm not gonna pretend that I understand how this is about the human spirit or some shit, this is obviously them talking about a real war in a way that's a little bit oblique and I have no idea wtf is going on.
I talked to a Persian about this stuff. She was going to college with a bunch of Kordish boys and she described them as "weird" but I could tell she liked them. This was something that was an issue in her day-to-day life, not something symbolic about anything tards in NYC would understand.
I see this so much with "film"
critics. There's something where I get that obviously there's a lot of censorship in their country so they're being indirect (anything from China for example) but totally talking about politics. And this just sails right over the heads of these tards. Wong Kar-Wai is one where he's explicitly said everything he does is political and honkeys just ignore that. (And come on Chungking Express is hitting you over the head with it. The expiration date on the can.) John Woo is has said his stuff is political from the other side and obviously is not a fan of communism. Zhang Yimou obviously is not a fan of Mao. These people are telling stories about their own lives and these dumb fricking r-slur "film" critics in New York want to make it about them.
A World Without Thieves I took as actually being a story about your basic experience of being a human being. Please don't tell I misunderstood it.
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I guess
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Seriouspost tho: Is there some political subtext to A World Without Thieves that I'm not getting. 100% not joking.
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I don't know I'm a little
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All them words won't bring your pa back.
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Actually he survived.
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Coming in to re-recommend Fantastic Planet (1973), probably the greatest French-Czechoslovak schizokino of all time
It was available on YouTube in English for years but the copyrigh
s have been getting uppity lately, so there is only the original Czech audio on YT, but the film has few dialogue, so you should understand what this LSD trip is like just by staring at it:
!kino !schizos !neurodivergents any other schizo kino recommendations?
Also did any !bookworms here ever read the Codex SeraphiniANUS?
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Unironically disturbed me and I just said to myself "all my French friends weren't using those drugs so I'm just gonna forget about it".
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Have you watched The Belladonna of Sadness or Mad God? I assume you'll have seen Angel's Egg
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Mad God was great
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No, I have only seen their gifs, I will watch them eventually
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The same director's Gandahar (1987) is even crazier. Gwen, the Book of Sand (1985) and Sky Song (2010) are two more very trippy European animated features that attracted critical acclaim.
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Thanks, lots of interesting looking stuff there
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?
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