Son of the White Mare
At a glance...
- Directed by Marcell Jankovics
- Released in 1981
- Runtime 86 minutes
- Watched at The Beacon Cinema
- Final feelings: cinematic anthropology on a monumental level.
Watching this feels like an anthropological experience. If you've ever marveled at cave art from early humans and felt a strange connection and alienation to this seemingly universal desire to represent the world around us, Son of the White Mare will feel eerily familiar. All the vivid colors, the striking and evocative shapes and sounds, the images derived from the pure expression of the human body unburdened by shame and respectability, come together in a way that feels like watching the continuation of the cave wall, as if the pictures sprang to life before your eyes.
As a collection of pure images, this movie is just unworldly. Like shock therapy to the modern brain that has developed a sensibility of privacy, everything is radically exposed here in a way that sparks feelings of embarrassment and delight. There is a visual language established beneath the cacophonous eruptions and pulsating births of the first 20 minutes, and that's why the introduction works with so little narration. Yes, it is confusing and strange to see so many colors and tendrils of heaven and earth. I myself felt lost and anxious, my mouth agape with awe. This was supposed to be a folk tale, perhaps the simplest of all narratives, and yet it felt so beyond my comprehension. All of sudden, whirling across the screen were the faces of the 3 dragons and I just about lost my shit. Instantly I knew I needed to see more of these characters, whose designs were so out-of-place they stuck out to me even in those fleeting moments, even though I did not comprehend what they were at all. From that point on I was totally under this movie's spell, even though (or maybe because) I hardly understood a thing I was seeing.
I think it's amazing that through the use of shape and contrast, this movie eliminates the needs for shading entirely (and outlines, as my friend pointed out). Pure shape and color is able to communicate so much, if you try to pause on any frame of this movie and just look at the image you will understand that a message is being made. There are no throwaway frames in the film. Like, it's just so cool that the movie matches the simplified narrative of the folk tale with simplified parameters for the images! And that even in these simple terms we can create complex, riveting, arousing and arresting scenes. If there is a trend for all movies today that I want to bring up, it's the prevalence of over-explaining things, to resist the possibility of truly baffling or challenging an audience. Animation, in particular, can often feel bound to formulaic rehashing of well-trodden forms (just to throw a name out there, Makoto Shinkai makes beautiful movies that all feel the same to me). In contrast, Son of the White Mare explains borderline nothing in both its writing and its illustration, and yet you can still appreciate the feelings of motion, color, and sound when watching. The ethos of allowing the audience to be confused is a big risk, but when paired with a strong direction it can make a huge impact. It certainly did on me.
I'm rambling but I think Son of the White Mare is brilliant. This is the power of animation! Instead of increasing the budget and the technical prowess to better mimic real life, we can instead lean in to the gap that exists, play within the restrictions of the medium, and create something that feels both alien and human. When you watch this film you are watching mythology. Whether or not it's what the people who originated such myths envisioned in their eyes is inconsequential; the visual language conveys myth, conveys folk tale, conveys fable, and so it is both universally applicable and so abstracted it confounds the first-time viewer. A movie like this continues. It starts anew each time you watch it, and it closes each time with a whisper of a promise of its return. It pulls at the rope of history to bring these forgotten tales to an unforgettable place, it dedicates itself in the opening seconds to the historic peoples of the Eurasian steppe from whom the tale derives. It is thus both of this world and beyond it. Illustration and animation are boundless in possibility, and it feels so good to watch a movie that really exercises that fact in a way that I've never seen before, all while being set to the most humble of stories. In short, Son of the White Mare is magic!