Dark animation omnibus

Here is the producer Prima Linea Productions' summary of the film Fear(s) of the Dark/Peur(s) du noir (2007) which combines the work of eight artists:

Spiders' legs brushing against naked skin…
Unexplainable noises heard at night in a dark bedroom…
A big empty house where you feel a presence…
A hypodermic needle getting closer and closer…
A dead thing trapped in a bottle of formaldehyde…
A huge growling dog, baring its teeth and staring…
So many scary moments we have experienced at some point in our lives – like the craftsmen of this journey straight to the land of fear.
Six of the worlds hottest graphic artists and cartoonists have breathed life into their nightmares, bleeding away colour only to retain the starkness of light and the pitch black of shadows.
Their intertwined stories make up an unprecedented epic where phobias, disgust and nightmares come to life and reveal Fear at its most naked and intense…

The artists are Blutch, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Jerry Kramski, Lorenzo Mattoti, Richard McGuire, Michel Pirus, and Romain Slocombe. They are designers who have done logos, product designs, and other things besides animation. Some of the black and white drawings are gorgeous, rich, subtle, pleasing to the eye--even distractingly so. Where the images are most beautiful, the animation is most lacking.

The best story is one by Charles Burns of a nerdy boy who loves insects and grows up isolated and timid as a college student. Like the sucker Koistinen in Aki Kaurismaki's 2006 film Lights in the Dusk, he is then seduced by a woman who only wants to entrap and use him, only this one is far more sinister and is perhaps the descendant of a praying mantis-like bug the man lost under his bed long years ago (he still sleeps in the same bed). Combining elements of Poe and Kafka, this story, which sensibly combines story elements that don't quite fit, is genuinely creepy. The drawing is fluent but utilitarian.

Caillou's story is set in Japan and concerns that standard image of Japanese helplessness and provocation to perverts, a uniformed schoolgirl. There is also a sinister doctor with a big hypodermic and the ghost of a samurai and a creature with several layers of eyes. The trouble is tha this story frequently interrupts itself and never finishes.

In between these are two other stories, because it is the team's aim to make their omnibus into some kind of seamless whole. First there is the animations of Blutch of the eighteenth-century man with a team of snarling dogs who attack a helpless boy. Then there is the screen of geometric games by Pierre di Sciullo, entertaining us with imagery that ranges from Saul Bass to the Russian Avant Garde, while an ironic, nagging woman (well voiced by Nicole Garcia, who has made a career of this kind of character) lists things she's "afraid of" or doesn't want to become.

Otherwise, I was not very taken by the stories and at times could barely follow them. The device of intermixing two of the animations/short films with the five others is a laudable effort to achieve unity and flow, but it only makes a confusing collection more so.

The language is French, though the team is multinational, including American and Italian. The film was shown at Sundance as part of a horror series. The images have a pencil look, achieved however with the latest technologies. For connoisseurs of black and white drawing in film, this is worth a look for the different styles. But as a cutting edge horror or scare movie or an accomplished series of animations, this collection seems very overhyped.

The film, shown at Sundance in January 2008 and at international festivals, debuted in Paris theaters February 18, 2008, and is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, February 29-March 9.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.