Movie Details
| Title: | Blood Tea and Red String | |
| Director: | Christiane Cegavske | |
| Year: | 2006 | |
| Genre: | Animated | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.22.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.22.06 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2006 Day 2. The next two nights' notes will be the most pressed for time since the weekend schedules start at 1 instead of 3. Pretty respectable crowds for everything today... I'm waiting to see what Monday's like. While I'm glad to see the festival doing well, waiting for an hour in line to see a movie i'm barely curious about kinda wore me down. Today's films were a steady ramping up of enjoyment for today, starting with this odd little stop-motion animated fantasy film. Sorry, Kier-La but I just couldn't get into this movie at all. I guess it took the director 13 years to make it so maybe it's tough to face cutting scenes that took you months to animate just for the sake of pacing... but man did it need it. There are a few scenes in here which just go on way too long... and it isn't helped by the fact that all of the movie's communication is via little animal chirps and grunts... no dialogue... so what little story happening is all very vague and weird and obtuse. So... I guess I can explain it as being about a group of albino mice-men who are maybe enemies with another group of brown rat-men with bird beaks... or maybe they just amicably co-exist in the segregated groups I don't know. Anyway, there's some business with this little doll of a woman and they sew an egg into her belly and it births as a woman-bird that gets caught in an old-maid spider's web. Along the way, the albino mice-men play poker with blank cards, drink red tea, and get in a fight when one of them cheats. I think. That was actually my favorite scene if you took away the five minutes of a half dozen clocks ticking that made up the soundtrack. There's also a stagecoach pulled by a turtle... and the rat- and mice-men all wear fanciful royalty clothes... and apparently it all takes place in a teapot. Whatever. If this was like an 8 minute short it'd be tolerable as something to sit through before going on to the main feature (much like the forgettable short before this was), but at 70 minutes... that's a long time to not have any clue what the hell is going on. At least for me it is. So I can see the work that went into this... she gets an A for effort... and it certainly was different. I was actually reminded just a smidge of Henry Darger's work in that it presented some weirdo original fantasy world... but it wasn't for me. |
