Mar 21, 2013

Prepare yourself for this trippy, incredible Polish animation!

Starting with its title, this Polish film is nearly impossible to describe. As soon as the title of the film appears on the screen, the letters of the title turn into question marks and exclamation points, which dissolve into a flag with a pipe-smoking skull on it. The skull emits pipe smoke from its eyes and quickly envelops the screen. Then the sun shines through. This is only for the first 10 seconds! Add another 30 minutes of uninterrupted surrealist madness, and you get the picture of this amazing film.

Krzysztof Dubowski (pictured left), a veteran of Polish animation, was in the twilight of his career when he made this film in 1986. It is a difficult film to classify because it does not fit into any conventional chronology of animation history. Some of the character designs hark back to the blocky "cartoon modern" style of Eastern European animation of the 60s and 70s, but the facial expressions resemble the crude graphic exaggeration of cartoons, and the cartoonish painted stills foreshadow the Spumko style of the early 1990s. The cartoonish painted stills are reminiscent of the early 1990s Spumko style. But any effort to compare individual elements of the film with other visual works is inadequate; it is the sum of D.bowski's vision that is so striking and utterly original.

D?bowski gleefully ignores the insular obsession of Western animators with achieving "the illusion of life." He breaks every rule sacred to character animators and makes things work the way he likes. His worlds function on the level of pure graphic cinema and exist only on their own terms. Characters are grotesquely distorted and move in ways that suggest human motion only in the most abstract sense. d.bowski does not use perspective, but rather expresses space through design and movement. Effects such as waves, clouds, and cannon fire are expressed through ornate patterns of shapes and lines that move in their own rhythmic fashion.

The film is visually lush, but the narration is heavy-handed and difficult to decipher. I asked Pavel Viszczinski, a film studies major at the New School in Manhattan and founder of the Kinoscope film series, to explain what I was seeing. Here is what he told me:

The title is "The Fairy Tale of the Pirate Palemon." This particular film is based on a fairy tale by a famous fable writer named Jan Brecheva. His fairy tales are generally aimed at a younger audience. I too remember his fairy tales from my childhood. He is certainly the most famous Polish author of fairy tales. This piece was written in 1956. A king dies, but before he does, he declares to his four daughters that whoever overcomes the pirate Paremon will win the crown. Paremont owned all the seas and his empire was enormous. Eventually, one of the king's daughters, the ugliest of the daughters, conquered Palemon's empire and became the new queen. But besides that, she is united and married to Palemon.

D?bowski should be an animation legend for this film alone. However, I had never heard of him until I stumbled upon this film while on a late-night animation binge. Further searches turned up absolutely nothing about him in English. Considering his prolific output, his lack of recognition in the West is unfortunate. He began directing in 1960 with Studio Miniatur Filmowych and made dozens of films over the next 30 years. The only film of his that I can find on the Internet is this early one called Wzesz?o s?oneczko.