ThurstonHunger

This movie can travel across borders, as it is free of language. Indeed it is even free of humans, so it quickly rises from animation to allegory.

The recommendation for me to watch this actually traveled over borders as well, from Korea to Hong Kong to me - well all through co-workers. I would extend it to you, if you have any interested in animated movies, Oscar-winning or otherwise.

In a strange way, this reminded me of a stranger film - "How I Lost My Body." There are tricks one can play on screen with animation that just cannot happen otherwise, and both films take you on an otherwise unfilmable quest. Unflimable for a multitude of reasons.

While the allegory could be as simple as the need for cooperation among different beings (even those who are prototypically enemies, I'm talking cats and dogs, not liberals and conservatives). The title of the film stood out, granted there is a tidal wave that rises and falls pushing our furry and feathered plot along,

I was wondering if "Flow" referred to a flow state or flow experience. To quote the person who coined that phrase :

"We have called this state the flow experience, because this is the term many of the people we interviewed had used in their descriptions of how it felt to be in top form: "It was like floating," "I was carried on by the flow."

• Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (1990)

During slower phases of the film, my mind did wonder if the cat was pursuit of a flow state, the activated being. Surrounded by a materialist (the lemur), an existentialist (the capybara), joyful gregarious youth (the labrador) and weary wizened old age (the phoenix? Well I googled it and apparently it is a secretary bird). Admittedly this a bit of a stretch to interpret the film (and never mind my notion that the leviathan/whale is a nearly deceased god) but the movie does seem to offer something a bit more philosophic than fantastic. Never mind some near death experiences, something at the core of all philosophies and much fiction.

Some of the animation here, notably the greenery before and after the deluge was very eye-catching for me. The animals are actually more intensely depicted by their actions than their illustrations imho.

One last comment as a Dad who shared animated treasures with my kids from a young age, I did check and the rating here is an appropriate PG. So if you have young impressionable beings aboard your own life-faring relation-ships, scouting the landscape here first before sharing might be wise.

I knew precious little about this movie before watching it. I may know even less after having watched it...and yet I enjoyed it tremendously

My son had recommended I watch "Quilombo" and this movie could pair well with that. A swirl of sound and color, a story that feels epic with anti-colonial overtones.

While the movie pulses with resistance, traces an odd odyssey of a striking and transforming character. It is like a poem, one tends to feel it rather than follow it.

If reading the one line/three clause official description baffles you, and you don't mind being baffled hop on board this Afrofuturist modern mothership.

I likely will rewatch this again, ideally with one or both sons. I think someone could take various frames and make paintings of them. I was sort of expecting this was a crazed masterpiece of an African auteur from Rwanda, but I guess I better call Saul (Williams) out as the genius.

At times this made me think of Sahel musicians recording music on cell phone chips - that kind of collision of tribal and techno.

Unanimous Goldmine, indeed.

The Beast is not the one with two backs, but it does seem to have two sides.

Director Bertrand Bonello talks the fear of love as a guiding path for this (very loose) adaptation of Henry James' The Beast in Jungle. But this film, if not the director himself, combines a clear fear of love with a very real love of fear.

The film opens with a green screen foreshadow-ing, and underscores the artificial flavors that this film is made of. That said there is a starkly clear reference to an infamous incel loser that cuts through like a grisly reality headline. The film stumbled quite a bit for me with that.

Trying to align an incel's fragile fear/hatred of the fairer sex, with a happily-but-not-happily-enough married woman's fear of a consuming and passionate love is a bit of a big ask. And the film goes through convolutions and time scenarios (distant past, present and 2044 future) that will leave a lot of viewers cold.

We do get Lea Seydoux in three incarnations, varying hair styles (that Belle Epoque coif perhaps the most fetching). We also get varying dance scenes by decades, besides the 1910 era - the others seemed so isolated and far from unifying.

I could hang with time jumps and with some of the clunky sci-fi: scrubbing one's DNA as path to comfortably numb serenity?? I did not know about the 1910 flooding of the Seine, which was all part of the cleverness on display. So many echoes/harmonics were enjoyable, as was a very romantic hand holding scene. Dolls and robots and people also refracted across time.

I agree with reviewers that cite a dream-like (or peculiar visual poetic) aspect to the movie. But in the end it felt so manipulative with little at stake for me the viewer. The excessive and artificial superimposing ended up feeling like watching some one else play a video game. Earlier subtle emotions cast aside for a leveling up of tensions.

Bonello remains a provocauteur (provocative auteur) which will likely keep bringing me back to his films. Perhaps like the recurring yet ill-fated lovers in the Beast. Does he try to have his fingers on too many pulses, leaving us viewers sensing he's more interested in wrapping his hands around our throats than sustaining a smaller, focused story?