Thereโs an increasingly undeniable hunger for the hand-crafted. As discourse around animation becomes more and more absorbed by anaesthetizing questions about AI, it becomes clearer that people who care about the medium are pushing for tactility and foregrounding real texture, materials imprinted with genuine human feeling. This feels especially true of Sun Xunโs โMagic Atlas,โ made over the course of a decade using a refreshingly unrestrained range of different materials and techniques: paint, pen and ink on paper, canvas and newspapers, woodcut, or indeed anything with which the director can bring this strange and dreamlike picture to life.
Produced in Singapore by Pi Animation Studio, the film is, to some extent, about a coal empire called Luocha. Ruled by fascist, industrialist despots, it is explored from the perspective of an orphan boy named Xiao Zhi who is granted access to its secrets by an imprisoned magician, incarcerated for giving people some measure of freedom back: the memories taken from them by this government. Plot honestly feels secondary to โMagic Atlas,โ which, despite a brief running time, is rather relaxed about getting Xiao Zhiโs story under way, opting to build the mood of the piece through its fluctuating, inky illustrations instead. (In fact, Xiao often disappears from the film, not long after he appears to question the state of the world as he has been taught to view it.)
The appeal of the film is predicated on oneโs fondness for the imagery, and perhaps oneโs patience for frequently opaque, fragmented, oddly paced storytelling. It opens with the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Buddhist scripture about โthe past, the present, the future lying in the present,โ followed by a sequence consumed by waves where painted creatures tussle. A narrator (voiced by the director) claiming to be โeverywhere, with no beginning and no endโ ponders his place in the universe as the style of the art shifts to aged pages and painted backgrounds in black ink. Surreal hybrid animals (including a horse with a camera for a head) prance across the landscape, impossibly, drawn with white lines on a black background.
And then the style shifts again: blue water, a black whale, exploding into more kaleidoscopic paintings which fly through what appear to be homages to Pieter Bruegel. Itโs a curious mix of eras, symbols, deities and animals all coalescing in one place, the invasiveness of the regime immediately apparent in how aggressively a factory juts from the more gently painted mountain landscape. Abstract electronic tones in the score create further dissonance in this surrealist fever dream of a picture as the scenery and style change to meet the needs of the moment.
Sunโs piece mostly orbits a monochrome palette of heavy, inky black shading (with white outlines) and a lot of line detail, with broad, impressionistic brushstrokes characterizing the landscape โ at least some of the time. But itโs never truly exact or particular about any one style, constantly breaking free of the oppressive obsidian lines that build its authoritarian setting. The next scene may totally turn that palette on its head with an explosion of colour and an embrace of a more โwesternโ painting style, or another segue into pen and pencil on paper. Throughout, cutting back and forth between scheming politicians in backrooms, foreboding factory lines and a natural world suffering both, Xun mixes almost cartoonish expression with the intense detail of painting.
โMagic Atlasโ is more compelling for how it looks than for how that look pairs with its story, even as it touches on some impressively odd and grotesque concepts, like a mass surveillance system comprised of giant mosquitoes. Thereโs little ambiguity about this mix of folkloric imagery with science fiction: The generalsโ Orwellian nature couldnโt be more apparent than in the moment they declare, โYou have practiced criminally outmoded thinkingโ โ to a child they charge with having โpossession of false memories.โ (Or rather, the memories the government permits people to have.) The blatant suppression of truth is, at least, an easy theme to relate to in the present moment.
Appropriately, the film doesnโt only dedicate its look to a single idea. A message from the director near the end speaks about how one of the filmโs standout sequences was a response to the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, made via an international collaboration of artists. The keenest ideas of โMagic Atlasโ lie in the moments where it places its malleable style against an idea of pacification through the co-option of art and entertainment. (During the big festival, there is a man in a mouse costume with a silhouette that resembles Mickey Mouse, though this could be confirmation bias โ take it as you will.)
Itโs perhaps a difficult film to fully connect with emotionally, not necessarily because of its symbolism but more due to its fragmented nature โ especially as the story becomes even more metaphysical, even poking fun at the artifice of its own created world. Xun has said before that heโs not particularly concerned if everyone understands everything in the film, a perspective which is more than fair. But the technical merits of โMagic Atlasโ prevent it from feeling totally alienating; frequently, the film even approaches the divine.
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