Something's going on up there: "Toys in the Attic" raises a ruckus !
Something's going on up there: "Toys in the Attic" raises a ruckus
Source: Hannover House / Target Development Group, Inc.
Date: September 11, 2012 20:15 ET
5-Star Movie Review by Joe Strike, Animation World Network
"Los Angeles, CA, Sept. 11, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- "What the hell was that?!" Krusty the Klown didn't know what to make of Worker and Parasite, "Eastern Europe's favorite cat and mouse team" when their indecipherable Cold War-era cartoon briefly subbed for Itchy and Scratchy. It's a safe bet Krusty would be far more favorably inclined towards Toys in the Attic, an animated stop motion feature directed by Jiri Barta and birthed in the Czech Republic, a land once trapped behind the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet rule.
This Toys has no relation to the 1960s stage play and movie, or Aerosmith's 1975 album. There is a strong echo of Pixar's Toy Story 3, wherein Woody and friends are headed for exile in the attic as Andy prepares to leave for college (but wind up in a day care center every bit as totalitarian as the attic of this film). Subsequent events save Andy's toys from said fate…but what if they wound up in the attic after all? And what if there were already a universe of forgotten toys up there?
Toys in the Attic is a political parable - the overthrow of communism told in miniature scale. It's too upfront to be considered subtext either, as the film's production notes make clear: "The world of the attic is divided into the land of happy toys in the West and the Land of Evil in the East. The despotic Head of State rules over the Land of Evil with a band of sinister minions, insects and rotted vegetables."
The 'Head of State' is exactly that - a plaster bust of an autocratic dictator who rules with the aid of toy warriors, a human-headed bug and an eavesdropping eye atop a coiling length of pipe. When the Head decides to kidnap the beautiful blonde Buttercup, the doll's toy friends set out on a rescue mission that ultimately leads to the Head's overthrow - literally, as he tumbles from his cabinet-top perch and shatters into fragments below.
The Czech Republic (or Czechoslovakia as it was once called) has been long known for its stop-motion animators.
It's given the world filmmakers on the order of Jan Švankmajer and Jiri Trnka, whose work has influenced others - in particular the Brothers Quay (who are currently enjoying a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art), While their work is often unnerving, Toys in the Attic itself is anything but creepy. The dolls who come to Buttercup's rescue are a mix of porcelain, plush, carved wood and fabric characters, a family of chess pieces with tiny dots for eyes - and an exceptionally heroic lump of clay with a bottle cap for a hat. The film is also a mix of animation techniques: when its stop-motion characters board a train they turn into paper drawings framed by the train's windows (and when the camera is behind them as they look out the window they're animated cut-outs). There's even live action in the mix: the Head is portrayed by a live actor whose made-up face has been CGI-grafted onto that bust. This isn't the first film to… 'toy' with the idea of playthings standing up to oppression; in Toy Story 3 Woody and friends help end the rule of a dictatorial teddy bear, and in the 1940's stop-motion Czech film Revolt of the Toys (also on view in MoMA's "Century of the Child" show), a toy carver's creations soundly thrash a menacing Gestapo agent." ...(more)
(more)
globenewswire.com
___________________________________________________
Jim
. |
