Film d’animation
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Inventing a city-state where, under the guise of equality, the inhabitants live with a paper bag on their heads, the Indian filmmaker probes with a gentle sense of the absurd the dualism between utopia and dystopia.
Schirkoa, the city of fables will first allow you to shine in the evening and stick your guests on the question: “In which film do we find Asia Argento in the casting as a DJ mermaid in her bath and mother of Gaspar Noé, alongside the Filipino river filmmaker Lav Diaz as a suicidal poet and Golshifteh Farahani as a prostitute with a numbered paper bag on her head? This is a brief sample of the incongruity of the animated film by Indian director Ishan Shukla, released in theaters on Wednesday January 1, based on his own short film, which starts from a well-known tune to offer an experience of singular arrhythmia . Or a character stuck in a dystopia, looking for a way out. “197A” is a civil servant in Schirkoa, a city-state at Blade Runner where, for the sake of equality and safety, everyone wears a kraft paper bag on their head with two holes for the eyes, like in a game of Sims. Outside, there is Konthaqa, a more colorful and hedonistic kind of Goa, where «anomalies», half-human, half-animal hybrids, against which Schirkoa has constructed an entire xenophobic discourse. “197A” awakens to revolt but the director arranges the adventures according to a strangely zen rhythm, contrary to the general trend of Western or Japanese animation which wants tension and climax at all costs. The animation
