Do you remember the old days with grandma?
"Crazy Dating Beautiful City" is an animated film from France, directed by Sylvia Jomai, released in 2003.
The general story of the film is that in a small village in France, an old grandmother Susan lives with his grandson Chapin. Chapin, a Tour de France cyclist, was taken to the United States by gangsters on race day. Determined to find Chapin, Susan brought her dog Bruno to the United States and successfully rescued Chapin with the help of the "three sisters".
The storyline of the film is relatively simple, but I have to say that "Crazy Dating Beautiful City" is a very special animated film. Compared with most of the mainstream commercial animation films on the market, "Crazy Dating Mirador" seems a little monotonous. It is not full of beautiful characters and cool fights like mainstream commercial Japanese comics, nor is it like Disney. That vivid to sweet three-dimensional technology. I believe that a large number of viewers will feel monotonous when watching "Crazy Dates in Beautiful City" at first, and the bullet screen of the film is often filled with words like "so boring, I don't know what to say". Indeed, "Crazy Dating Beautiful City" looks very easy to get bored on the surface. The film even has few lines, and the style of painting is still a non-mainstream European comic style. But it's like a bowl of slightly bitter soup, only when you drink it slowly can you feel the power it brings.
What is the biggest feature of animation? In the animation, we can see that tables and chairs can jump around; small animals can speak freely like people; warriors with superpowers can go to the sky and go to the ground... All things that are impossible in reality can happen in animation; so I think the biggest feature of animation is the surreal performance of the characters.
Nowadays, more and more Japanese comics are beginning to become "morning dramas", and the characters are always talking non-stop. I dare to ask if the real people can take pictures and let the animation express it, what's the point? What is the surreality of animation? An obvious feature of the film "Crazy Dating Beautiful City" is that there are almost no lines, and the story is completely supported by the performance of the characters. Director Sylvia Qomai once explained: "I always thought that animation, an art form, may be more powerful if it is not bound by lines. If you have to make everything work with the lines of the characters. , then most of the action may have to be done around the mouth. Without the constraints of lines, you will be more free to create real animations and 'speak' in the form of animation itself."
In the surreal performance, I really admire the imagination of director Sylvia Jomai.
"Crazy Dates in the Beautiful City" is often able to have amazing, yet hilariously exaggerated performances. For example: the three sisters singing and dancing in the opening, a typical Disney-style performance, the characters' movements are exaggerated to the extreme.
And Susan's odd ways of relaxing Chapin's muscles—using a vacuum cleaner, a blender to loosen Chapin's legs; a lawnmower pushing Chapin's back; and Susan using a fat Bruno as a tire .
Of course, what made me applaud the most was the way the three sisters grabbed the frog, which turned out to be a grenade...
However, the exaggeration of "Crazy Dating Beautiful City" is obviously different from Disney's emotionally. The former does not appear very "lively and cheerful", and even makes people feel a little weird, or rather dark humor than weird. Black humor is an absurd, perverted, and pathological genre of literature, a comedy that juxtaposes pain and laughter, absurd facts and disproportionately calm reactions, cruelty and tenderness. This dark humor is another great feature of the film's style.
"Crazy Dating Beautiful City" uses a lot of such dark humor to ridicule the United States, such as: the Statue of Liberty is exaggerated into a fat woman holding an ice cream and a hamburger; and the streets are full of fat people; cars can't hit them. Poured fat baby.
It is worth mentioning that although "Crazy Dating Beautiful City" mocked Americans like this, it was nominated for the Oscar for best animation that year.
The first time I watched "Dating Crazy" was in elementary school. At that time, the CCTV6 movie frequency band on the TV happened to be playing this animation. I still remember it was a gloomy, cold rainy day, wrapped in a quilt in the unheated southern winter, and I watched the movie. And when I watched this movie, I immediately rushed out of the bed, came to the window, and looked at the raindrops falling from the sky, I suddenly felt that the world was so warm, I wanted to rush out and run in the rain to embrace this world impulse. Of course, in the end I obediently returned to the quilt, but that warmth is still unforgettable to me.
Warmth is what I feel the most about this movie. The story of the film is very simple, the main line is that grandma Susan rescues her grandson Chapin. The protagonist Susan, with her love for her grandson, let her not be afraid of hardships, found her grandson through hardships, and rescued him from the clutches. And what I mean by warmth is that faint, simple affection. What I think is the most amazing thing about "Crazy Dates in Beautiful City", and what fascinates me the most, is that it can express this subtle warmth in such a strange animation, and it is still so wonderful and subtle.
There is an air of nostalgia everywhere in the film, and nostalgia is also the film's theme. Nostalgia, I think "old" here refers to a past tense of innocence. Whether it is the love of the three sisters for art, or the love of the grandmother for Chapin, or the curiosity of young Chapin for various affairs in childhood, there is a trace of "pure". Life is like the first time, do you still remember the days when you were a child with your grandma or grandma? The kind of simple warmth between people is really memorable.
Just because the theme is nostalgia, the modern mechanical, industrial and fast food styles have become the targets of the director's ridicule. Remember that Bruno who barked at the train? It has a fear of trains because its tail was run over by a toy train when it was a child, and it will bark involuntarily whenever a train or a train passes by. Bruno's dream is also often used as a means of transition of the film. There is a dream when Bruno is lying on Chapin. In the dream, the Chapin under Bruno became a steam engine, Bruno seemed panicked, it passed by the window of his house, and inside the window, the passengers in the train barked at it, the roles were completely reversed. There is also the gangster's gambling tool, which is a machine similar to a treadmill with a screen added to the front. Chapin looks at the virtual scene in front of him and rides his bicycle without stopping. All of this is like a microcosm of the loss of individuality of human beings under industrialization. We are indulged in virtual images. Everything is so efficient and fast that we forget the emotions between people.
The protagonist of the film is grandma Susan. An old lady with short stature and long and short legs; but she is also full of all kinds of wisdom. Susan can come up with all kinds of wonderful ways to solve the problem. For example, she used very exaggerated high heels to make up for her long and short legs; as mentioned earlier, she used various tools to relax Chapin's muscles; Use the Bruno as a tire when it is inflated. Of course Susan's biggest feature is her love for her grandson Chapin, which makes her a superhero! Susan can only rely on a small boat to cross the stormy Atlantic Ocean, she can infiltrate the gangster's underground casino posing as a maintenance staff to outwit the gangster; at the end of the film, she trips the gangster's car with her high heels alone. Susan always acts boldly because of her love for her grandson. It is love that gives her such courage, and animation gives her such ability.
At the end of the film, the old Chapin, who used to be silent, finally said his only line to the TV: "It's over, Grandma." I was in tears when I saw this. On the one hand, this is to take care of the grandma's question at the beginning of the film, "Is the movie over?" At that time, little Chapin said nothing, he didn't feel his love for his grandmother. Chapin seemed to be an autistic patient. Everything around him can only be accepted silently. Finally, at the end of the film, he senses his grandmother's love and comforts his grandmother's spirit in heaven.
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