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FANTASIA 2026: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SPACETIME CHRONICLES (2025)

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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.

Still from Spacetime Chronicles (2025)

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)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HAIR HIGH (2004)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Eric Gilliland, Sarah Silverman,

PLOT: A middle-aged bartender recounts a tragic tale of doomed love to a young couple.

Still from "Hair High" (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Plympton’s trademark animation style, verging on surrealism, meets a personal take on familiar rom-com and high school drama tropes.

COMMENTS: Bill Plympton is a major name in American adult animation today, especially for those preferring the offbeat and the bizarre. His raw and expressive style, full of crude jokes and grotesque yet hilarious visual gags, balances gross-out humor with a lighthearted and wholesome tone. Nowhere is that blend more apparent than in High Hair, a unique take on high school rom-coms with a esque twist.

A barman recounts the tale of Cherry and Stud and their unexpected, passionate love affair to two young students. We trace the teen drama tropes from the beginning: Cherry is the popular girl, and Stud is a nerdy, friendless loser. Cherry already has a boyfriend, the muscular Rod, another reason Stud shouldn’t have a chance with her in real life. However, when Rod “punishes” Stud by forcing him to become Cherry’s slave, something sweet and slightly kinky blossoms between them.

A love affair starting as a power game or a conflict is another well-worn trope of romantic comedies. But Plympton’s approach offers something different than what you’d might expect. The first half of the movie is full of crude, if admittedly inventive, jokes. Disturbing imagery is played for laughs, with even a hint of animated body horror. Gradually, a sweet love affair blooms, one that, surprisingly, doesn’t feel uneven or forced at all. The second half of the film follows Cherry and Stud falling in love, until a final twist combines the dark and macabre with an unexpected, yet not unwelcome, dose of tenderness.

Among the visual gags of special note—and there are many—are jokes about the characters’ hairstyles.  As the title hints, hair is a rich symbol in this movie. Follicles can express femininity or masculinity, and even take the form of a phallic symbol. Here, hair indicates hierarchy and social status.

All in all, this is a whimsical film, a perfect date movie for weirdos. Those who aren’t turned off by some bad-taste humor will be rewarded with a touching narrative. Behind the weirdness and grotesquerie beats a heart.

Hair High [Blu-ray]

Hair High [Blu-ray]

  • Acclaimed animator Bill Plympton’s (THE TUNE, MUTANT ALIENS) cheerfully unhinged tribute to 1950s teen romance and musicals like GREASE and HAIRSPRAY

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64*: CITIZEN DOG (2004)

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Mah nakorn

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Mahasamut Boonyaruk, Saengthong Gate-Uthong, Sawatwong Palakawong Na Autthaya, Raenkum Saninn, Nattha Wattanapaiboon

PLOT: Pod leaves his remote homestead for the bright lights of Bangkok, ignoring his grandmother’s warning that he will grow a tail in the big city. There, he loses a finger working in a sardine factory, then falls head over heels for cleaning lady Jin, who is intensely focused on a book that she found after it fell out of a crashing passenger jet. Her curiosity leads her to monomaniacal environmental activism, leaving no attention for Pod, who tries to remain close to her through a series of odd jobs that bring him into contact with some of the city’s more unusual residents, including a man who licks everything, an undead motorcyclist, and a child-like woman in a passive-aggressive relationship with her teddy bear.

Still from CItizen Dog (2004)

BACKGROUND:

  • Based on a novel by the director’s wife, Koynuch, which Sasanatieng illustrated. The novel was, in turn, based on Sasanatieng’s unpublished screenplay.
  • The title is a pun on the city’s name, “Bangkok, Great City.” By changing one letter in the Thai translation—Krung Thep Maha Nakorn to Krung Thep Mah Nakorn–-the name becomes “Bangkok, City of Dogs.”
  • Narrated by director , whose films include Last Life in the Universe.
  • Boonyaruk is a musician (some of his music appears in the movie) making his film debut here. Gate-Uthong is also a film novice, having worked previously as a fashion model.
  • The foreigner handing out protest leaflets who Jin dubs “Peter” is played by Chuck Stephens, an expatriate film critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Thai cinema expert, who also worked on the movie’s subtitles. 

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Sasanatieng’s candy-colored Bangkok is rife with visual pleasures, but none as dramatic as the literal mountain comprised of plastic bottles that Jin recovers and carefully cleans, a peak which Pod and Jin separately ascend in a desperate search for meaning and jointly summit in celebration of love. Just as Bangkok itself is portrayed as an urban nightmare made beautiful by the people who live and love there, this mountain of trash is transformed into a wonder by the community.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: A chain-smoking woman-child’s love-hate relationship with her teddy bear; Grandma’s gecko rap

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The one thing that’s guaranteed to come up in any discussion of Citizen Dog is a reference to that milestone of quirky romance, Amélie. The comparison is not without merit: the two films share a bemused enjoyment of life’s pleasures. Sanasatieng looks to do the French hit one better, though, marshaling all his resources to highlight the strangeness of his characters, be they main, supporting, or background. No one in Citizen Dog zigs when they could zag, and strangeness and silliness are very much the norm. The opening scene in which everyone sings along with the soundtrack would be a musical number in most contexts, but here it feels diegetic, the voice of a community singing as one.

Original Thai trailer for Citizen Dog

COMMENTS: Life in the big city is hard. Say you get a nice job slicing Continue reading 64*: CITIZEN DOG (2004) →

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAO (2025)

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チャオ

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DIRECTED BY: Yasuhiro Aoki

FEATURING: Voices of Ouji Suzuka, Anna Yamada, Ryôta Yamasato, Kenta Miyake, Kavka Shishido

PLOT: Stefan, a mild-mannered company drone with a dream, finds he is the key to peace between landmen and mermen when Neptune’s daughter chooses him to be her husband.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: This collision of Plymptonian flourish and anime fundamentals is an hour and a half of wild lines, vibrant colors, giant heads, small heads, robo-antics, and the pratfalls of a literal fish out of water. Intense. Cute, too.

COMMENTS: In an introduction recorded for the Fantasia screening, director Yasuhiro Aoki tells us to enjoy the fun, and that we should keep an eye on the many little details. It is well to heed his soft-spoken advice: his film is stuffed to the gills with sight gags, throw-away visuals, and plenty of narrative slight of hand. As a conjuring trick—for ChaO is nothing short of magical—this account of Stefan’s strange courtship pays off handsomely for the observant viewer. The wild flow of line and form, not to mention the glorious buffet of colors, builds to a fantastical showdown as the lowly hero bumbles from one awkward challenge to another.

The meet-cute between the lovebirds comes like a bolt out of the blue. (Albeit the ocean blue, not the skies above.) Dreaming of fabricating a marine-friendly ship propulsion system, Stefan faces a hectic journey one morning when alerted, and then attacked, by his roommate’s new robot-alarm invention. Shouted at, and ultimately smacked upside the head by, this assertive electronic, he escapes his tiny apartment, tossing a cool drink to the ever-present, never-working rickshaw driver out front. He’s charged with swabbing the deck of his boss’ ship (“Mr Sea”, a Little Tikes Toddle Tot-proportioned opportunist) and before he knows it, the sea king’s daughter singles him out as her suitor—and all of Shanghai is on board for the courtship.

Framed as a recollection from a burnt-out Stefan talking with an eager reporter, ChaO‘s energy is (barely) contained within its anecdotal form. Highspeed chases with feral reporters, inexplicable animated asides, and the omnipresence of ChaO herself—in glorious-pink koi form, five-foot tall, with golden high-top sneakers and jets of blue water flowing from her gills—make for an experience akin to one’s eyeballs being speedily pulled about by an enthusiastic raconteur. So much craft is packed into its ninety minutes that by the breathless, face-scrunching finale on the high seas as Neptune launches his watery arsenal at the hapless Stefan, some may be relieved that the end is in sight.

ChaO is a marvelous experience, with Yasuhiro Aoki batting the optic nerve with cleverness, cuteness, and confusion. (The infinitely long hospital bed, or the casual heaping of spun lavatory paper as Stefan panics in the men’s room, are among the head-scratching moments that could lead the viewer to a new bald spot.) Being so visual in its nature, I can only hope to convey a fraction of the peculiar charm. The child-friendly nature of this romantic comedy fish tale adds to its appeal, landing ChaO as another of the all-too-few gateway films for young weird-o-philes in development. Like Spirited Away and Ghost Cat Anzu, Yasuhiro’s madcap outing compels a manic grin which lingers well after the closing credits.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a dreamlike logic to the world that might not make literal sense, but it holds surprising emotional weight…  This weirdly beautiful and absurdly humorous fable timelessly unfolds, reveling in its Japanese tendencies and aesthetic.” — Joshua M. Hayes, Josh At The Movies (festival screening)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: John Patrick Shanley

FEATURING: , , ,

PLOT: A terminally-ill sales executive quits his dreary job and agrees to jump into a volcano.

Still from Joe vs. the Volcano (1990)

COMMENTS: What makes a man give up a career as a firefighter—enthusiastic, feeling good all the time, and casually courageous—to become an administrative drone at the worst factory this side of Staten Island? Apparently it’s three-hundred dollars a week. That’s small change for getting your spirit crushed eight hours a day: working under a foul-tempered boss, drinking arsenic coffee, and feeling your brain fry as you soak up the rays of droning fluorescent lights.

And what makes a man throw everything away and opt to willingly toss himself into a volcano?

This second question makes up the bulk of John Patrick Shanley’s directorial debut, Joe Versus the Volcano. (Which, for the longest time, was the famed screenwriters only directorial outing.) Shanley is at his peak picaresque powers, impressively avoiding the “cutesy trap” as he maneuvers his charming leads—and guest actors—through a well-paced, well-plotted, well-shot adventure, toward a seemingly inevitable end. Indeed, there’s so much buoyancy in the cast and tone that the semi-demi-hemi-twist of fate ends up being, in hindsight, the only viable fate for our passive hero.

Odd and awful, Hedaya steals his ten minutes as a supervisor; despite half his lines being over the telephone—and half of those lines being “I didn’t say that!” Comedy stalwart Lloyd Bridges swans in as a rogue fairy godmother, belittling Joe and his apartment before offering the improbable plot hook, just after opening a canister of salted peanuts and emptying them on the coffee table. And thrice-credited Meg Ryan delights as the three women Joe pursues (well, ends up in the vicinity of by mere happenstance…), showing a playful versatility which mirrors the trajectory of Joe’s self awareness.

Joe Versus the Volcano does more than immolate us in a firewall of charm. Joe’s job at “Parascope” (famed both for its rectal probes and impressive petroleum jelly sales) is a Dantean combination of German Expressionism and grime. The jagged pathway to the godawful factory (which mimicks Parascope’s trade logo while bringing to mind Caligarian sets) delivers us, from the start, into the blurry, grit-sheened hell of industrial living. We meet Joe here, and Joe needs must be Hanks. We need to like this loser, who has fallen from grace (or whatever echelon former-firefighters fall from). His performance is a charismatic variation of Ryan O’Neal’s turn as Barry Lyndon. But whereas O’Neal’s Lyndon was mired in a cynically reactive worldview, Hanks’ Joe is capable of awe and appreciation—which is why Shanley’s fluffy romcom works so well, and why we end up heartily rooting for Joe to overcome the looming trial-by-magma.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gradually during the opening scenes of Joe Versus the Volcano, my heart began to quicken, until finally I realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before… Hanks and Ryan … inhabit the logic of this bizarre world and play by its rules. ” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Joe Versus the Volcano [Blu-ray]

Joe Versus the Volcano [Blu-ray]
  • Polish Release, cover may contain Polish text/markings. The disk has English audio.
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