Starting a thread for this since I'm assuming it'll have several other members posting shortly...Apperson wrote: ↑Mon Jan 13, 2020 10:28 amDeciding to limit myself to films released last year I'll go with I Lost my Body, the French animated film on Netflix and one of the nominees this year, it has one of the best scores of the entire year and a ton of style.
I'd also recommend watching in the original French voice-over as opposed to the English dub.
I'm not usually an animation aficionado, but I have to agree that this was more than worth its brief running time, and I'm glad Apperson chose it because I'm not sure I would have gotten around to it otherwise.
Not only is the score excellent and style plentiful as promised, but the melancholy tone and humanist focus was a bit of a surprise for a film (at least partially) about a sentient, mobile disembodied hand. An elliptical narrative filled with flashbacks makes for engaging viewing, and that melancholy manages to avoid ever tipping over into miserabilism. Perhaps most importantly, Clapin's unwillingness to pander to its protagonist (a Moroccan immigrant in Paris named Naoufel, both when intact and otherwise) and his love interest ultimately avoids some of the easy narrative pitfalls one might expect would be coming after the first 20-30 minutes.
Another bullet dodged was the one I was most worried about going in: making this 75 minutes of the madcap adventures of a hand lost in Paris, showing off some animation chops but failing to establish anything of interest beyond that. Happily, that conceit never overwhelms the core narrative, and in fact supplements it quite well. One of its best — and most appropriate — attributes is how immersively tactile and sensory the movie is, taking time to emphasize the sensations and sounds associated with, say,
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having a rat lick old canned tomato sauce off your finger, or stepping on a detached eyeball
Absolutely the nominee I'll be pulling for among the animated feature hopefuls Sunday night, and I'll be curious to hear what others (especially some more engaged with the genre than I am) think of it.