I Misplaced My Physique assessment – hand on coronary heart, you’ll love this… | Animation in movie
W.Though the Christmas box office charts are likely to be dominated by Disney’s family-friendly singer-songwriter sequel Frozen II, anyone looking for something more adventurous in animation should check out this remarkable French gem, which will see limited releases ahead of its UK release on Netflixon November 29th .
It’s a story about broken hearts and body parts. Loosely adapted from the book Happy Hand by Guillaume Laurant (who was Oscar-nominated for his scriptwriting on Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie), it was the first animated feature to top the Cannes Critics’ Week Award before further major wins in Sitges, Strasbourg and at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. This feature film debut by co-writer / director Jérémy Clapin combines a tender love story with the macabre feel of a body horror film and builds on the success of his acclaimed short films Une histoire vertébrale (2004), Skhizein (2008) and Palmipédarium (2008) in 2012 ) confirming the arrival of an important new voice in international animation.
Like Thing from the Addams family or a kind relative of the title attachments from The Hands of Orlac, I Lost My Body finds a severed hand that is brought to life in a Parisian medical laboratory. After the hand is released from its surgical bond, it learns to crawl, then run, then run, and scurry out of sterile captivity into the hustle and bustle of the outside world like a frightened animal. It’s a terrible place filled with thundering traffic, crushing machines, and predatory rodents, all of which are encountered when the hand crawls across rooftops, streets, and subways, searching for its former self.
On the surface, the story seems steeped in horror, but the main tone is delicate and melancholy
In the meantime, a second flashback takes place in parallel; tactile memories of the hand’s life when its lost body was whole. This body belongs to Naoufel, a pizza delivery boy trying to meet his deadlines and who is intrigued by the disembodied voice of Gabrielle (an angry customer) on a high-rise intercom. As the kaleidoscopic narrative retreats even further, we see Naoufel as a child in Morocco who, accompanied by his parents, laughs and records the sounds of his world on a beloved cassette recorder – sounds that become symbols of a lost innocence and broken childhood.
Themes of dismemberment – physical, emotional, temporal – run through this beautifully haunting story as it effortlessly interweaves the real and the surreal, the spoken and the still. Clapin carefully leaves the narrative voice of the dismembered hand from Laurant’s source novel aside and manages to convey huge amounts of emotional information through the simple movement of the fingers, creating a completely rounded (and above all completely personable) character whose sensory experience is the world is eloquently expressed through gestures and pantomime.
The most impressive thing about I Lost My Body, which producer Marc du Pontavice (who cites Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata as an inspirational influence) envisions as “fictional animation for teens and adults” is the way in which he different marriages marries tones and formats. On the surface, the story seems steeped in horror, and there are a few moments that will send a chill down your spine – the accidental strangulation of a pigeon trying to protect its eggs, for example; or an attack by wild rats in the bowels of the subway. There are also pulsating action sequences as the hand scurries through crowded streets and reaches for the underside of a speeding train.
The primary tone, however, is gentle and melancholy – an almost existential evocation of memory and the longing to become whole. In an early sequence in which the hand climbs over the rib cage and skull of a display skeleton (watched by a soon-to-be-crushed eyeball!), The gallows humor turns into something more awe-inspiring as it escapes onto a high windowsill overlooking the horizon. I was unexpectedly reminded of an illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep that I owned as a child – a picture of the engaged characters gazing at the greatness of the world beyond them, filled with a terrible sense of wonder. Fear and infinite sadness.
Just as the themes of I Lost My Body cleverly juggle light and shadow, the film seamlessly combines 2D and 3D animation techniques with elements of rotoscoped live action to create what Clapin “is an animated world halfway between the tangible and the imaginary “. . It’s an impressive feat, reminiscent of Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit’s combination of analog and digital processes at The Red Turtle, creating something that maintains a grainy, hand-drawn texture while harnessing the possibilities of new technology.
A beautiful electronic score by Dan Levy rounds off the picture, emphasizing the romantic themes of longing and loss and pulling our hearts without resorting to sentimentality.
