Rob Chiu recently uploaded an older fictional short film about innocent people displaced by war. Is it weird? Sufficiently. Is it great? Undoubtedly.
Tag Archives: Animation
SATURDAY SHORT: BOUT (2011)
A wrestling match between two masked figures builds in intensity as a mesmerized audience incites ever more violence.
CONTENT WARNING: This short has strong stylized violence.
146. HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE (2004)
Hauru no ugoku shiro
“I love the animation, ’cause it’s very magical and very… fantapsychological?”—12-year old Josh Hutcherson (who played Markl) on Howl’s Moving Castle
DIRECTED BY: Hayao Miyazaki
FEATURING: Voices of Chieko Baisho, Takuya Kimura, Akihiro Miwa, Tatsuya Gashūin; Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, Christian Bale, Billy Crystal, Lauren Bacall (US dubbed version)
PLOT: Sophie is an 18-year old girl who works in her mother’s hat shop in a kingdom where wizards exist alongside flying airships. One day a witch strides into the shop and curses the girl, turning her into an old woman. Sophie runs away from home and finds work as a housekeeper for the wizard Howl, who lives in a magical wandering castle powered by a captive fire demon.
BACKGROUND:
- The movie was loosely based on the children’s novel of the same name
by English writer Diana Wynne Jones.
- Miyazaki stepped up to complete this project after the original director quit over creative differences.
- One of the major changes from the novel is that the action is now set during a senseless war. Pacifist Miyazaki added the war subplot to express his anger at the United States-led invasion of Iraq.
- In the Japanese version the same actress (Chieko Baishô) voices both young and old Sophie; in the English dub the duties were split between Emily Mortimer (young) and Jean Simmons (old). In the original Japanese the Witch of the Waste is voiced by a male (drag queen Akihiro Miwa).
- Howl was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film (losing to the Wallace and Gromit feature Curse of the Were-Rabbit).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Obviously, it’s Howl’s moving castle, as clinking, clanking, collection of caliginous cartoon junk as ever animated. The castle is a random assortment of turrets, gangways, girders, smokestacks, and bat wing fins, with cottages attached at various points, lurching along precariously on mechanized chicken legs like some replica of Baba Yaga’s hut commissioned by a mad steampunk billionaire.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Take witches and wizards and place them inside a world with low-tech Victorian technology, and you have a steampunk fantasy. Now, filter that peculiarly Western brew through Japanese sensibilities, and add in Hayao Miyazaki’s flair for spectacle and childlike surrealism, and you end up with a story containing so many strata of magic that it approaches the casual incoherence of classic folk tales.
Disney American dub trailer for Howl’s Moving Castle
COMMENTS: Although set in a mythical European milieu—the picturesque cobblestone streets and red-trousered dragoons with handlebar Continue reading 146. HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE (2004)
SATURDAY SHORT: HEART (2011)
Conflict arises when a red heart appears in a black and white world.
145. MARQUIS (1989)
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“This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. I found it to be discomforting and just weird… This movie gives me the chills. However, I would watch it again just because it is so fascinatingly WEIRD.”–IMDB reviewer ethylester (June 2002)
DIRECTED BY: Henri Xhonneux
FEATURING: Voices of François Marthouret, Valérie Kling
PLOT: The dog-faced Marquis de Sade is imprisoned in the Bastille for blasphemy, where he entertains himself by writing pornographic novels and holding long conversations with his talking penis. Among the other prisoners is Justine, a pregnant cow who claims she was raped and is carrying the King’s child. The prison’s Confessor plots to hide the bastard heir by claiming De Sade is the father; meanwhile, outside the Bastille walls revolutionaries would like to free the political prisoners for their own purposes.
BACKGROUND:
- The historical Marquis de Sade was imprisoned at the Bastille, where he wrote the novel “The 120 Days of Sodom,” from 1784-1789. The Bastille was just one stop in a series of trips to prisons and insane asylums that dogged the aristocrat his entire life.
- The two main female characters in Marquis, Justine and Juliette, are named after the title characters of two of de Sade’s most famous novels. Perverted scenes from the Marquis’ actual stories are recreated with the movie, using Claymation.
- Little is known about director/co-writer Henri Xhonneux, who besides this film has only a few even more obscure credits to his name.
- Artist/writer Roland Topor, of Fantastic Planet fame, was the better known co-scripter of Marquis. Topor also served as art director for the movie.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Surely it must be one of the many tender moments when the Marquis holds a heart-to-heart talk with his own member (named Colin), although there are so many of these dialogues that we will need to narrow down our search further. We’ll select the moment when Colin, lacerated from having pleasured himself inside a crack in the stone prison wall, stares weakly at the Marquis while wearing a little bloody bandage wrapped around his head like a nightcap, begging the writer to tell him a story so he can recover enough strength to fornicate with a cow.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Every character in the movie is based on a different animal and wears an animatronic mask that looks like it came out of a pile of designs Jim Henson rejected for Dark Crystal as “too creepy.” In between Machiavellian political machinations, these beasts have kinky sex with each other. The Marquis de Sade, a handsome canine, holds long conversations with his cute but prodigious member Colin, who has not only a mind but a face and voice of his own. As pornographic costume biopics recast as depraved satirical fables go, Marquis registers fairly high on the weirdometer.
[wposflv src=http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/marquis_clip.flv width=450 height=300 previewimage=http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/marquis_preview.png title=”Marquis clip”]
Short clip from Marquis
COMMENTS: Although you could consider it a porno puppet shock show or a misanthropic fable concerning man’s animal nature, perhaps the best Continue reading 145. MARQUIS (1989)