#foreign animation

[the-indie-owl]

Any More HIAF Fans Still Active?

Bonus: A Crossover No One Asked For:

[sam-keeper]

Horror Rec: Felidae (1994)

These Le Chats sure are Noir ahahahahaha. Aherm. Uh let me start again.

It feels crass to open a review of an animated film this brilliant with a "wham, pow, animation isn't just for kids anymore!" line, but in my defense the film does invite comparisons. Explicitly: intrepid cat detective Francis, our smartass lead, makes a crack at one point that despite its feline cast, this isn't "The Aristocats". There's even a little kitten later who looks suspiciously like a character from that movie. He's right though. The Aristocats doesn't feature, early on, the discovery of a cat with its throat ripped gruesomely out, windpipe spilled on the grass.

No, as Francis tries to unwind the mystery of these grisly serial murders, the film quickly signals that it is, simply, Kitty Giallo. It's a bit of a mystery, a bit of a noire, and a bit of a lurid slasher with eerie supernatural elements. It never stops reminding you, with its sheer glut of weird freaks, cults, psychic and psychedelic dreams, dungeons and haunted moldering houses, and frank expression of cat horniness, that this is meant to be taken seriously even in its extremity.

It's also Kitty Giallo in the sense that it takes full advantage of the cat protagonists. The feline subjects and the animated medium allows them to perform tense chase sequences and complex set pieces impossible with a human cast or live action subjects. When acrobatics are the baseline assumption of your main characters, you can get much more elaborate when they're pushed to extremes for survival. I can't imagine, honestly, making this film in any other medium than cartooning, which can abandon the naturalistic and literal when it needs to. Some sequences even reminded me of scenes from Pink Floyd's The Wall, such as an extended gruesome nightmare where a towering Gregor Mendel erupts, raving, from a sea of cat corpses. Puppeting the decaying and disintegrating bodies before a terrified Francis, he sings, "Und Hop! Hop! Hop! Und Hop! Hop! Hop! Experiments on plant hybrids! Experiments on plant hybrids!" It achieves that greatest affective frission of horror's art: I want to look away; I'm captivated and can't.

Not just empty spectacle, Felidae puts all this lurid cartooning to a purpose. This is a film about human horrors: vivisection, animal testing, and the legacy of eugenics. The violence that enters the world of cats flows downstream from human violence. Though, notably the film never shies away from nature in all its own special brutality. These cats hunt rats, fuck, and kill each other over territory disputes. Serial murder, though, like the laughing free range rabbits in Watership Down, signifies a baleful human influence on the behavior of these animals. Thankfully, the film also discards a "return to purity" as its own unachievable and ultimately poisonous dream, not opposed to but intimately entwined with these human vices.

It's too bad that historically people haven't known what to do with this film. I didn't, when I watched it in my 20s. I remember being sort of bewildered by the tone, (especially the sensuous theme song by Boy George of all people). The film, like a lot of the animated films on this list that I adore, did poorly at the box office. If this was the original trailer, it doesn't set the film up for success, framing the film as a cat based mystery-thriller more than a film about serial murder, cults, and gruesome unethical animal experiments. Sometimes it's very important to aggressively signal your animated feature isn't a kids' movie! Rewatching it now, though, with a greater familiarity with its genre sources, I can appreciate just what a masterpiece it is. And thankfully, with Deaf Crocodile's new loving restoration, it might achieve more of the recognition it deserves.

I'll be doing more reviews of horror movies, a lot of which you probably won't see talked about anywhere else, all this month, so follow along in my horror tag here. If this piece helped you appreciate art more deeply, consider following me on patreon, adding me to your rss reader, and tipping me.

[therealakechianna]

I love making these

[djinarocks]

what do you suppose could be the reason we don't see Chuck's father in "Help! I'm a Fish"?

My personal theory that Chuck's father was an workaholic who would neglect his wife and son, he was more focused on work than spending time with his family. Even when there are rare times when Chuck's father does spend time with them, he is very cold-hearted and distant towards them. Then something unexpected happens. One night, after coming back after work, Chuck's dad gets confronted by his wife Anna. She was upset that he spent doing work rather than being with his family. Until Anna notices a strand of hair on his coat, as a sign of his cheating on his wife with another woman. This leads this conversation into a heated argument. This situation happened when Chuck was only 5 years old at that time. Thus leads into Anna divorcing her husband. Which is the reason why Anna is sometimes overprotective to her son.

Despite his parents being divorced, Anna tries to let Chuck visit his dad at the weekends. While his dad's girlfriend is polite and nice to him, his dad not so much. He has no problem telling Chuck to be quiet when he is doing his work and ignores any sort of contact with his son. After Chuck telling his mom about this, she decided to cut all of her contacts with her ex-husband.

[thinkbolt]

Scruffy : Sterling : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Story of a kitten who ran away from home. He meets new animal friends and they share several adventures. But when danger comes they realize

Scruffy (1959, dubbed from a 1953 Soviet film)

[sighinastorm]

Don't let the description fool you; the video is only 49 seconds.

[leetaylatuparitaulus]

Second half of my screenshot post!

[moomingitz]

Old animation from when the Soviet Union was still a thing, particularly from Russia, is very interesting. Not only are a lot of the shorts and films actually very well animated, but I would even say some of them are on par with Disney. Yet they still have at least a hint of that distinctive more somber feeling I personally associate animation from the former USSR period.