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DIRECTED BY: Stefano Bertelli

FEATURING: None credited

PLOT: Fred is a student whose attempts to resolve his various encounters—particularly his rendezvous with Hana in Japan—regularly land him in a cosmic inner space.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Papercraft stop-motion meets 4th-dimensional musings in Bertelli’s film, whose protagonist just cannot seem to wrap up events in his life. And there’s a talking cat.

COMMENTS: We are in a classroom, and Fred asks to be excused. He hoofs the school corridors to the bathroom, and makes it in time to spew forth a tidal quantity of ecto-green vomit, overflowing the toilet, overflowing the restroom, ultimately washing down the school hallway in a viscous wave. A cat asks what that was all about, and Fred replies, “That was just a memory.” Like all of us, Fred has countless memories; unlike us, Fred experiences his own mind space as a hangar-sized chamber, with a starlit background, a growing gyre spurting cubes, and, of course, an enigmatic talking cat providing comments and advice.

Stefano Bertelli pursues two grand ambitions with his feature debut. The first is long-form animation with paper stock. All motion and effects are achieved the hard way, as paper Fred interacts with other paper people and navigates a three-dimensional space made up of a paper sky with paper clouds above, and paper buildings and paper vehicles below. This vibrant aesthetic easily catches the eye and is a perfect vehicle for the odd sense of humor which runs throughout. Pratfalls in the cosmic mind, recurring encounters with a bully, paper Fred playing a paper rendered first-person shooter on a paper television: the playfully absurd mingles freely with temporal philosophy.

The last is the crux of the Bertelli’s second ambition, for Spacetime Chronicles has a great deal to say about happenstance, decision making, and fate. Fred wants to follow up his meet-cute with Hana, whom he encounters on a tram. But each step is interrupted by increasingly unlikely tripwires (indeed, what are the odds he’d end up in room number four on the fourth floor of the hotel just after learning that numeral is borderline dangerous?). The cat does its best to tidy his subconscious and tip him towards his desired fate, even tossing aside one of its nine lives in the effort. But it’s all quite confusing for Fred, and us as well; we’re told that to manipulate our lives is as simple as choosing to perceive our preferred fate. We learn alongside Fred, however, that that may be an impossible task, and we may all just be doomed to be reduced to a heap of memory boxes beneath a heap of rubble.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fred shifts between reality and a surreal dreamscape… a monumental technical achievement and a visual feast not to be missed.”–Ricky Archeluta, Film Threat (festival screening)