Written by Tatia Rosenthal and Etgar Keret; Directed by Tatia Rosenthal.
The everyday if sometimes mundane lives of the characters in this stop-motion film make it an experiment in animation that is a fascinating break from the normal (if beloved) mainstream animation that graces our screens in which characters, usually animals, can fly, have super barks or at the very least, can talk to humans. That the filmmakers here made a feature-length animated film that most closely resembles a moving graphic novel of everyday people and events (possibly heroes but certainly not superheroes) is a welcome foray into an area of animation rarely seen and that has the potential to hold up a mirror to our existence in the same way as the work of graphic novelists such as Shary Flenniken, Adrian Tomine and Gilbert Hernandez.
While recently there have been other notable animations that focused on “real” people in real situations (Persepolis, Year of the Fish, Waltz with Bashir), that this film is rendered in stop-motion brings to the screen characters who cast actual shadows, cry tears of liquid, and who move in actual physical relation to each other and their surroundings in three-dimensional space; who place tiny records on tiny turntables that exist as real objects. Coupled with lesser known voices (Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia being the most well-known), this makes for a much more believable film experience than 2-Dimensional or 3-Dimensional animation, and is miles away from the singing, loopy stop-motion creations of Tim Burton and Henry Selick.
The characters here are believable individuals we have never seen before yet are instantly familiar to us as types. These are not fun creatures doing wacky impossible things, they are fictions wrung from the fabric of everyday life, focusing on 29-year-old Dave Peck, an unemployed dreamer searching for the meaning of life who thinks he may find it in a $9.99 self-help book, and an assortment of characters in his apartment building. There is even a love-making scene that is hilarious in its realistic nature.
How rare this type of animation is when we can basically count on over-exposed actors to voice the latest animated characters. $9.99 is a compassionate stare at life, rendered in an entertaining, occasionally amusing visual style. It’s a promising development that so many animators are pursuing projects that delve into the most dramatic aspects of our lives through unique characters that resemble us, or our next door neighbor.
$9.99 screened as part of the 2009 New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center.
Review written by Mike Fishman.
2 comments:
Your comparision to "alt comix" is apt, I'm not sure if measuring this against the likes of "Kung Fu Panda" is fair, though.
There are really no narrative or thematic similarities. One fish, the other fowl.
Stack "$9.99" against "Ghost World" maybe and you can begin to measure the success of one against the shortcomings of the other.
Your point is well-taken. I was looking at in terms of animation in general but could have drilled down further to make a more apt comparison.
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