2023-12-07 22:30:23
Updated Thursday, December 7, 2023 – 21:30
The films by Pablo Berger, Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal and Alberto Vázquez make it so that for the first time in history Spanish animated cinema goes so far in the Hollywood Academy Awards.
A moment from ‘Robot Dreams’, by Pablo Berger.WORLD
A dog in love, a robot forgotten on a beach, some falsely adorable bears at war against some beautiful and innocent unicorns, and the story – sad, forgotten for too long and now essential – of the pianist Tenrio Jnior. These are some of the protagonists of a perhaps childish, but historic event. Everything that happens for the first time is, because it is exceptional, historical. And it is historic that three films from a country without consolidated animation studios and without, precisely, history in the genre have placed up to three productions in the final on the way to the Oscars.
‘Robot Dreams’, by Pablo Berger; They shot the pianistby Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, and ‘Unicorn Wars’, by Alberto Vázquez entered the list of 33 films announced on Thursday and that will be voted on by the academics of the animation subcategory plus those of the rest of the sections that accredit a minimum number of films seen. From there the five nominees will come out.
It is true that there are only three out of 33, but, again, it is no less true that it is the first time something like this has happened. Yes, last year ‘The windshield wiper’, the animated short film by Alberto Mielgo, won the Oscar, but, again, it was much more the exception than the rule. And it was short. In feature films, the only candidates that Spain has had have been ‘Chico y Rita’, the previous 2011 production by the couple Trueba and Mariscal, and ‘Klaus’, by Sergio Ramos in 2019.
An image from ‘Unicorn wars’, by Alberto Vzquez.
The three are three completely different projects, but, in some way, they share something: their rare and prodigious exceptionality. Only ‘Unicorn Wars‘ is the work of a full-time animator. The director of ‘Psychonauts, the forgotten children’ (2015) has been shaping his own world for more than a decade (his first short film dates back to 2010) in which the fable takes on the raw and somewhat bloody tone of one story at a time. tender and deeply gloomy. The now nominated film passed through the Annecy Festival where it was crowned the great reference of Spanish independent animation.
In case of ‘They shot the pianist It is as peculiar as its directors are peculiar. Both in his celebrated previous film and in this one, the virtue is the mixture and the impossibility of defining with a single genre a film that mutates between documentary, drama, classic cinema and, of course, animation. Both the drawing and the body of the narrative bear the unmistakable stamp of authors who are at the same time, together or separately, filmmakers, illustrators, graphic artists and even tireless conversationalists. First the Toronto Festival and then the San Sebastin Festival witnessed a premiere that seemed like a revelation. And event.
Image of ‘They shot the pianist’.
Robot Dreams, For its part, it has just been released and the miracle proposed by Pablo Berger is on display in theaters. Again, and as I did in ‘Snow White’, the idea is to leave the word free of the noise of the words (it makes sense). And that happens in a beautiful poem about friendship, loneliness, oblivion and forgiveness. As in the previous case, its director arrives at animation with new eyes ready to create from there a world as indebted to Miyazaki as it is attentive to Murnau. It is cinema that transforms before the spectator’s eyes into tragedy, comedy, musical and dream. Its premiere in style at the Cannes Festival places it in a privileged place.
Among the rest of those highlighted in this first list, and therefore competitors of the three Spaniards, masterpieces such as ‘The boy and the heron’, the pletric and anarchic farewell of the master Miyazaki; the umpteenth proposal from Pixar with ‘Elemental’, by Peter Sohn; the French delicacy of ‘The Journey of Ernest and Clestine’, by Jean-Christophe Roger and Julien Chheng; the deployment of talent, ingenuity and multiverses of ‘Spider-Man: Crossing the Multiverse’, by Jaoquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin Thompson; the virguera between the animated and the carnal ‘In the name of the land’, by the Polish DK Welchman; the anime prodigy that is’Suzume‘, by Makoto Shinkai, or the blockbuster ‘Super Mario Bros.: The Movie’, by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic.
Just seeing so many (three) in the meantime (33) is, indeed, historic.
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