SF IndieFest: Blood Tea and Red String
Stop-motion animation grabbed us at an early age with our yearly viewings of Rankin-Bass puppetoon Christmas specials. There was something undeniably engaging about those shows, and it wasn't just the cutesiness of it all. In fact, we began to realize later in life that they were, in fact, slightly creepy. And that made us love them all the more.
Our appreciation for stop-motion and its fascinating creepiness only increased when we discovered the work of Jan Svankmejer. Here was an artist who took the inherent creepiness of stop-motion and ran with it. Tim Burton has also gone the creepy route with his additions to the genre.
Of course, just WHY stop-motion animation is so inherently creepy is something we haven't been able to fully understand. Part of it is the jerky motion of the characters, so different from their smoother drawn or computer animated counterparts. Another aspect is the utter surrealness of the (usually) still backgrounds. But regardless of it all, the thing we love the most about stop-motion is this: The characters and the sets all...exist. They aren't code in a computer, and they aren't drawings on an animation cel. They are actual, three dimensional things, just like our toys at home. And when those tiny animated characters and sets are tiny pieces of art unto themselves, so much the better. Christiane Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String, which had its world premiere at the Castro as part of Indiefest Thursday night, is a stunning example of animated art.
Image from Christiane Cegavske's site.
The story centers around some woodland creatures who create a doll for a trio of regal white mice. When they can't bear to let the doll go, the mice steal her away and take her back to their home, where they proceed to play cards and get drunk on blood tea. Meanwhile, the doll's creators don some brown capes, (not unlike some famous hobbits), and venture off to recapture their doll creation. Along the way they meet a mystical frog and a black widow spider that bears an uncanny resemblance to Emily Dickinson. To tell any more would spoil the magic of the film.
We loved this movie, which held us enraptured for its full 70 minute running time. The detail Cegavske put into the creatures' animation is quite accomplished, and we almost didn't notice that the film has no dialogue, as everything that needed to be said was done with movement. While some of the camera moves were a little shaky at times (trying to pan a camera while animating something via stop-motion is a hard thing to get right without the benefit of some pretty expensive camera equipment) we still got a pretty good sense of action through much of the film. Our only criticism is with the non-animated opening and closing segments. They seemed unnessary and, ultimately, a little confusing.
Being that the film was shown at 5 p.m. on a Thursday, the crowd wasn't quite as large as one would expect for an opening night screening, but the audience that was there seemed to love the movie, (although we got the feeling the majority of them were friends of the director). Cegavske, clad in a red and black Victorian outfit (she sells similarly-themed clothing on her Web site) took to the stage to answer questions after the movie. She spoke about how long the film took to finish (12 years), how it began as a short film (12 minutes long), and how big the actual dolls in the film are (about 12 inches high. We see a trend here.) She also spoke about her working with Mark Growden on the film's score, and we kind of regret not buying one of the soundtrack CDs that was available in the lobby after the screening. The film's music is really quite lovely.
After we left the Castro Theatre, we joined the huge crowd waiting to get into the "big" opening night film, The Proposition. As we shivered in the cold, we were suddenly hit in the face by a fistful of popcorn. We looked around to find out who was raining the crowd with stale snack food and finally found the culprit: An almost seven-foot tall, belligerent, drunk drag queen wearing a black velvet dress and a white fur stole. And all we could think was: She'd make one hell of a puppetoon.
Blood Tea and Red String plays the SF Indiefest again tomorrow, Saturday the 4th at noon at the Roxie. View a trailer here.