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Robinson Crusoe Goes Postmodern Helmer Anca Damian follows up Marona with The Island, a wild, surreal, musical take on the castaway saga. By Ramin Zahed
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ver two years ago, Romanian director Anca Damian made a huge splash with her much-loved, award-winning feature Marona’s Fantastic Tale, which pushed the artistic envelope while telling a deeply moving story about a dog’s experiences. This year, the brilliant auteur is back with a new movie that is ready to shake up the status quo, deliver eye-popping visuals and offer some clever insights about the human condition in the modern world. The film, which is set to make its premiere at the Cartoon Movie event in Bordeaux, France in March, is a wild re-interpretation of the classic tale of Robinson Crusoe. However, it clearly has a lot on its mind, as Damian offers commentary on race relations, the plight of immigrants and our planet’s tragic environmental future. Did we mention it’s also a musical and features peculiar sea sirens as well? We had to ask the bold animation director about what prompted her to follow up Marona with something so amazingly different? “The project was inspired by a concert performed by Romanian singer Ada Milea and Romanian/ British violinist Alexander Balanescu about 10 years ago, which was based on the Gellu www.animationmagazine.net
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Naum’s play Insula (English: The Island), that was a reinterpretation of Daniel Defoe’s novel – Robinson Crusoe,” Damian explains. “This chain of reinterpretations would not have tempted me if I wouldn’t be interested in giving my vision on the present reality of ecological collapse and refugees issues.”
Witnessing Society’s Collapse Damian says the surreal premise of the movie is taken in a purely artistic direction which departs from conventional storytelling to speak of current affairs through visual poetry and symbolism. “I take a stand about the conflict of interest that is changing the policies in Europe, but I do it with a touch of a poetic imaginary that borders the mythological tale,” she explains. “The issues are presented through highly figurative symbolism that contrasts with the light tone of the music. While the literal setting is not realistic, the statements are subtly issued through the visuals. Plausibility is completely disregarded, yet the surreal narration echoes the grim reality of the refugees nowadays.” The animation for The Island is split between studios in Romania, France and Belgium (Aparte
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Film, Komadoli, Take Five) and some of the same team that worked on Marona also worked on this movie (Gina Thorstensen, Dan Panaitescu, Mathieu Labeye, Julien Dexant, Hefang Wei, Chloé Roux) as well as newcomers Gilles Cuvelier and Mathieu Perrier. “The visual style of the animation is different from Marona,” Damian notes. “The look is immersive so we have a lot of 3D and a lot of liquid and fluid elements in Houdini. The characters are 2D but much more realistic, and have also real textures on the top, so that involved a lot of cut-out animation. The pipeline followed the same way I had done before, by giving feedback literally to everyone, on a full-time (24 hour/day) basis, and coordinating all the process. Being a much more complex animation and out of the box project, it was quite exhausting, I confess, but it was also very exciting.” Looking back at the four-year journey of the movie, Damian says the biggest challenge was that the final film couldn’t have been imagined at the script level. Yet she still had to finance it at that stage. “As a postmodern conceptual work, the subject of the film could not be judged by dogmas of narrative structure and cinematic dismarch 21
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