A boy with crooked facial features seeks plastic surgery from a rather bizarre hospital.
Tag Archives: Stop motion animation
103. BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING (2006)
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“The doll character had been working its way into my drawings since 1990. A lot of these things evolved from drawings. The drawing is coming from the subconscious, really, so you don’t really know why, or say ‘why am I drawing it’?”–Christiane Cegavske on the DVD commentary to Blood Tea and Red String
DIRECTED BY: Christiane Cegavske
FEATURING: With one minor exception, all characters are silent animated puppets
PLOT: A group of aristocratic white mice commission rodentlike creatures with beaks (called the “Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak”) to create a doll for them, but once the puppet is fashioned the Creatures refuse to give it up; instead, they revere it and sew an egg they find floating in a creek inside its torso. The mice steal the doll and take it to their lair, so the Creatures set out on a journey to recover it. Along the way they meet a frog sorcerer and a spider with a human face, and everything changes when the egg inside the doll hatches.
BACKGROUND:
- The film took 13 years to make, with Cegavske animating perhaps 10 seconds a day. Many of the models and effects used show up in the director’s 1992 short Blood and Sunflowers.
- Cegavske intends for Blood Tea and Red String to be part of a trilogy, and in 2011 she announced the second part of the project, titled Seed in the Sand. She estimates this installment will take five years to complete.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blood Tea is bizarre throughout, and many will be attracted to the psychedelic splashiness of the sequence where the Oak Dwellers eat hallucinogenic berries and see morphing pink and green leaf patterns overlaid on the courtyard garden. For my money, though, things are at the weirdest when we climb inside the dark mouse hole and watch the well-dressed vermin pour bloody tea onto the lips of the lifeless doll while their skull-headed pet raven looks on.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A dialogue-free stop-motion animated fable done in the style of Jan Svankmajer, but with a darkly feminine spin, Blood Tea and Red String gently folds surrealism into its fairy tale structure to create a weirdly compelling world. It’s an inverted Alice, told from the perspective of mutant rodents, depraved white mice, and mystical frogs.
Original trailer for Blood Tea and Red String
COMMENTS: Artist Christiane Cegavske had been living with the haunting creatures of Blood Continue reading 103. BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING (2006)
LIST CANDIDATE: LUNACY [SILENI] (2005)
Lunacy has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies. Comments are closed. Please visit the official Certified Weird entry.
DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer
FEATURING: Pavel Liska, Jan Tríska, Anna Geislerová
PLOT: A mentally unbalanced man meets a modern day Marquis de Sade, who convinces him to check himself into a bizarre asylum where the patients roam free.
![Still from Lunacy [Sileni] (2005)](https://i0.wp.com/366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/lunacy.jpg?resize=450%2C253 "Lunacy")
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Readers may think I’m a lunatic myself for not inducting this tale involving the Marquis de Sade, an asylum run by chicken-farming lunatics, and animated steaks onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies on the first ballot. To tell the truth, Lunacy comes about as close as a movie can to being a first-ballot inductee without making it. In defense of my decision to leave it off the List for the time being, I point out that Lunacy may actually be Jan Svankajer’s most conventional movie. If you mentally remove the startling but inessential stop-animation transitions between scenes, then squint hard, it looks like just a regular horror movie; the director insists as much in his prologue to the film. Given that this is Svankmajer’s most “normal” and accessible movie, if Lunacy makes the List, then all the Czech director’s work should automatically make it.
COMMENTS: The trailer explains that ” Edgar Allan Poe + the Marquis de Sade + Jan Svankmajer = Lunacy.” It’s self-evident that combining these three uniquely perverse talents should produce something singularly strange; the fun in watching the movie is in seeing how they actually mix. Poe adds the least to the recipe, providing mere plot. Adaptations of two different stories by the doom-laden 19th century Romantic make appearances here; one is a digression from the main plotline that’s fun but unnecessary, while the other supplies the basic conceit for the entire second half of the movie. Because the first half of the film is devoted to a long introduction to the characters, with that excursion into an interesting but unrelated Poe tale, Lunacy‘s story doesn’t flow as well as it might; the plot doesn’t really get started in earnest until the movie hits the halfway mark on its run time. Other than basic story ideas, there is not much of a “Poe” feel to the rest of the film, except whatever lingering flavor comes from the passive, psychologically tormented protagonist Jean (stringy-haired, Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: LUNACY [SILENI] (2005)
SATURDAY SHORT: THE FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF CLOUDMAN (2010)
One aspect of Phoebe Parsons’ work is its tendency to skip from different animation styles to live-action. “The Fantastic Adventures of Cloudman” is no exception. In its thirteen-minute length, no one animation style prevails. Even the live-action sequences are spiced up with fireworks, Styrofoam, paper-mache, and sometimes even animation, making them vary considerably.
CONTENT WARNING: This short contains brief drug use, and some mild violence.
SATURDAY SHORT: UNDONE (2008)
Alone at sea, an aged fisherman struggles to hold onto the various items he reels in. Yielding no progress, he begins to epitomize the inescapable progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
With such beautiful imagery and shocking surrealism, “Undone” could only be assembled by a first-hand witness to the effects of the illness.
Undone from Hayley Morris on Vimeo.