It feels like this is Folman’s ambitious attempt to make “a mother of all movies”, that film that manages to be relevant and prescient, heartfelt and intellectual. Israeli-born director Ari Folman made a brave move when he departed from the documentary approach that earned him so much praise with Waltz with Bashir, to plunge himself into this expensive, risky and convoluted affair. It turns out, in this hypothetical future pharmaceutical companies have made an unlikely alliance with Hollywood studios to develop the new frontier in entertainment a drug-induced state where people escape from reality to adopt any shape they want and carry out their fantasies in a universe unhindered by any sense of morals, law or even physics. What makes the soiree special is that it’s held not in any physical venue, but in a reality that only exists in every assistant’s mind. The studio is interested in renewing their agreement and invites Robin to speak at an annual congress where they unveil their latest productions.
#SUBMARINE CARTOON SHOW MOVIE#
The movie fast-forwards two decades into the future when the contract is close to expiring.
It’s at this point where the film splinters off both stylistically and thematically, moving from a grounded live-action universe into a psychedelic, wacky toon world reminiscent of the Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s and loosely inspired in Stanisław Lem’s classic sci-fi novel from 1971 The Futurological Congress. (Real life studios are already doing this by the way) The deal offers a hefty sum of money, but has one caveat she can never act again.ĭespaired to see the worsening condition of her child and pressured by her manager (played brilliantly by the great Harvey Keitel) Wright accepts the deal in a 20-year contract. They want to scan not only her body but her gestures, movements, and performances so they can use her in as many projects as they like, just as any other digital or physical asset. Out of the blue comes an offer from the biggest player in the industry, “Miramount Studios”, which are interested in owning the rights of Robin Wright’s artistic persona. As we get to know her, we learn that her career has tanked in part because her attention is mostly focused on her son Aaron, a pre-teen who suffers from Usher syndrome a rare genetic disorder that is slowly deteriorating his sight and hearing. In The Congress, Wright is an aging performer who never quite fulfilled her superstar potential because of a reputation of being capricious and unreliable.
The Congress starts off with a 45-minute live-action segment where we are introduced to actress Robin Wright playing herself. At the time of its release, audiences and critics either hated it or liked it with equal passion. That multiplicity is precisely what makes this film so special, and also so divisive. Throw in there a multilayered love story, a very poignant commentary on identity, a scorching critique of the Hollywood studio system, lots of pop culture references and an insurgent revolution for good measure this is one of those films that turns out to be a real a challenge to sum up when someone casually asks you, “what is it about”? Part live-action, part animation, the movie is, in essence, a cautionary tale of capitalism gone wrong, but it doesn’t stop at that. Imagine an onion with so many layers, at one point it gets so complex you can’t even tell if it’s an onion anymore. While we acknowledge that these tales don’t make the best of date movies, we do guarantee you won’t see your smart home assistant the same way ever again.Īri Folman’s The Congress is many things at once, and that’s both its biggest merit and its most notable flaw. We’ve decided to list five of the most innovative and distinctive dystopias ever told in animation angst-ridden tales that take us from hyper-stylized versions of Paris to psychedelic far away planets. Since then, animation, both as a technique and as a genre, has mainly been considered as an affair directed to children,-thanks Disney!-and it’s just until the 1970s that adult-oriented animated projects started to appear with relative frequency, with authors incorporating nudity, drugs, and violence into the medium. The first animated feature films to portray dystopian tales are probably The New Gulliver from 1935, a Soviet production that mixed stop motion, live action, and 2D animation, and Fleischer Studio’s 1939 classic Gulliver’s Travels, both adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s famous satirical work from the early 18th century. We could argue that animation, unconstricted from many of the rules that apply to other art forms, is the perfect medium to convey these highly inventive and morbidly irresistible visions of the future. Dystopia is perhaps the one genre solely dedicated to exploring those scenarios where everything just goes to shit.
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